Happy New Year, dear readers!

What better way to launch into 2017 than revisiting our good friend Mayur Gupta, truly one of the icons of the marketing technology world.

Over the history of this blog, some of the most fascinating stories to me have been observing how things change over time. One is the growth of the marketing technology landscape, as it’s blossomed from 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016 (and, yes, 2017 is on the way).

Mayur’s career is another one of those ongoing stories. I first met him in 2012, when he was a marketing technology & strategy director at SapientNitro — a technologist building software for marketers. I published my first Q&A with him in January 2013 as he took on the role of global head of marketing technology at Kimberly-Clark — essentially one of the world’s first chief marketing technologists. I then profiled him in the summer of 2014 for the Harvard Business Review article, Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist. We then did another Q&A together in September 2015 after he became the SVP and head of digital at Healthgrades.

And now, he’s the global vice president for growth & marketing at Spotify. (Congratulations!)

To me, Mayur is the archetype of the hybrid marketing and technology executive for this decade. He’s blended those two discipline masterfully, and watching his career take shape over the past 5 years has been a personified narrative of how “marketing” as a profession is being elevated and transformed. (I had his story in mind as I was writing my article last month on digital transformation as the #1 disruption to “marketing” underway.)

Without further ado, here’s Mayur’s perspective on marketing technology here in 2017…

1. We’ve been excitedly following your career arc as a kind of bellwether example for hybrid marketing technology executives. When we last checked in, you were the head of digital for Healthgrades. What prompted you to make this new move to Spotify?

It has indeed been a journey — satisfying and surprising at the same time. Having started off as an engineer and technologist many years back, it’s been a steady and gradual shift, first towards the intersection of marketing and technology, to now being right at the center of modern marketing.

Data, technology, and marketing are intertwined in this digital world, and my career, I believe, is a by-product of that evolution.

That is a reflection of the fundamental shift from the analog world I grew up in to the intrinsically digital world we all live in now. Technology has empowered the consumer with seamless discoverability and accessibility, redefining customer experience, which means marketing now has a very different role to play within organizations. Data, technology, and marketing are intertwined in this digital world, and my career, I believe, is a by-product of that evolution.

Somewhere during this journey, I realized that the hallmark of a great technologist or a marketer is their understanding and empathy towards the customer. Once you have that, you can deliver experiences that simplify and change lives.

Music in general is central to both, a reflection of human behavior and desire while having the power to change the same. This is how people connect with each other. Spotify provides that marketplace both for the fans and creators of music and creativity. At a time when there is so much disruption happening within the category, I have the opportunity to converge the science of data and technology with the art of marketing and storytelling.

2. Can you tell us more about your role at Spotify? Where does marketing technology fit into this?

The role is fairly straight forward: apply data-driven marketing to grow the business. For me, that simply means inspiring more fans to listen to more music more often and provide a frictionless ecosystem that enables more artists to create more music more often for more fans.

As the category gets more mature and fragmented, fans get more choice, forcing the brands to become more precise, relevant, and progressive about every single interaction, agnostic of channel or type of media.

The strategy to make that real will include all the ingredients of a data-driven marketing organization that works in partnership with product, content, and business teams. It requires the ability to listen and understand the human behavior and the unmet need at any given point in the journey and being able to meet it just in time. My role is to make that a reality.

I think of the entire ecosystem as a running engine, then marketing technology represents the pipes connecting the different pieces together.

Marketing technology is central to the engine. If I think of the entire ecosystem as a running engine, then marketing technology represents the pipes connecting the different pieces together, while data is the oil that flows through these pipes.

Without marketing technology or the pipes — I’m sure we will discuss microservices and APIs at some point — we lose the ability to listen, analyze and relevantly engage with the customer. What needs to be a connected ecosystem will only be a dispersed set of individual tools. We will have data and we will have content but no way to apply them to deliver a value proposition for the customer.

3. Now that you’ve worked with a variety of different companies, including board positions with more traditional firms, are there common patterns around the technological evolution of marketing that you’ve discerned?

It’s been really fascinating and eye opening revelation for me personally. I have had the benefit of working across the Fortune 100’s to Fortune 5000’s as well as growth companies in various capacities. Some of these companies are multi-billion-dollar CPG/retail firms and others span across health/dental care, digital, technology, and entertainment.

Regardless of the industry or their size and scale, every single one of them is on a very similar journey towards digital transformation and disruption — of course, at perhaps different stage of the journey.

The opportunities and challenges in this digital economy that center around the customer are extremely consistent and agnostic of the industry itself. If you have an underlying framework for digital transformation that may include becoming a data-driven agile organization or evolving the role of marketing to drive growth with art and science, you can shut your eyes and apply it across these industry verticals with minor tweaks.

The same applies to marketing and the growing role of data and technology within marketing. There is a very simple reason for all of this — the “customer.” We are operating in a customer-led era, and the moment organizations start to put the customer at the center of their ecosystem, these strategies become consistent.

Every brand and CMO now acknowledges that marketing and technology are intertwined. Technology is the interface of marketing.

For instance, very specifically around marketing technologies:

• Every brand and CMO now acknowledges that marketing and technology are intertwined. Technology is the interface of marketing. In many cases, technology is the experience. Enters “marketing technology” as a core function in 7 out of 10 companies now (my rough estimate).
• At the same time though, the challenges of a chaotic, fast-paced, and fragmented marketing technology landscape are equally obvious.
• Marketing departments now have the budget to purchase marketing technologies, but are struggling to maximize adoption and activation.
• However, there are organizations that have an advanced vision of a connected marketing technology ecosystem. They are able to drive tangible growth and lifetime value with data-driven engagement and always-on algorithmic experiences. They are already talking about a marketing operating system enabled through APIs, services, and data integration across internal and external systems.

4. You’ve brought a high level of technical sophistication to the marketing teams that you’ve worked with. Is that effectively a requirement for modern marketing success? What steps should companies that don’t yet have that in their DNA take to develop it?

Marketing, technology and data are inseparable – that’s no longer a question but a proven fact.

We are trying to serve an extremely modern customer who is technology dependent, not just technology savvy, living and operating in a connected digital world. Her expectations are soaring high. She has control, choice, and speed at her finger tips. She demands the highest value with the most immersive and personalized experience, along with a story that makes her the protagonist, not the brand.

Modern marketers need to converge data and technology with impeccable storytelling to drive customer engagement.

That’s a very high bar. Traditional models of mass marketing, where you talk at the customer to tell the brand story, perhaps saying you are unique, just like the other brand, can no longer meet the customer expectations. Modern marketers need to converge data and technology with impeccable storytelling to drive customer engagement — and do it every single time — to earn, not buy, loyalty.

There are many frameworks out there, from the 5Cs of Modern Marketing to MIT’s latest study to help organizations drive digital transformation.

However, I am not sure if there is a defined set of steps to drive the cultural shift other than to build a belief that the change and disruption has already happened. Organizations must either drive this fundamental digital transformation and change the business or eventually run out of business.

5. What about the evolution of marketing technology this year? For instance, what do you think of some of the recent discussion of microservices as an architecture for a company’s digital “operating system?”

It continues to amaze all of us — the exponential growth, the mergers, the acquisitions. Just when you think it will slow down, it goes faster.

We will not have the mother of all marketing technology companies under a single umbrella that will come out with a “marketing operating system.”

I think there are a few patterns I have noticed in the last 12-18 months:

• A realization that we will not have the mother of all marketing technology companies under a single umbrella that will come out with a “marketing operating system,” an mOS like iOS. We all had hoped for an Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce to make that a reality, but the pace of diversification is much higher than consolidation. The bar for innovation is so low today — there is a new technology idea every single day.
• This brings back a service-oriented architecture and an open framework right at the center of an ever-expanding ecosystem.
• Data becomes the linchpin that allows these technologies to align themselves in context to the customer journey, and data integration has become the most critical focal point.
• The latest acquisition of Apigee by Google is a reflection of that realization and industry maturity around the need to build scale through services and APIs.

As modern marketing becomes more and more algorithmic and programmatic across channels, the need for a marketing operating system that is connected through data and services will be inevitable.

6. We hear a lot about “design thinking” in marketing today. That’s important, but you’ve also argued that marketers need to bring “systems thinking” into their organizations. What does that mean?

In the last few years, I have become an ardent student and adopter of “systems thinking” across every aspect of the business let alone marketing.

Most leading organizations are focusing on becoming “ecosystem organizations” that truly have the customer at the center. Everyone wants to be the next Amazon that has built concentric circles of value for the customer. They have redefined competition and collaboration in a digital economy, dropping the traditional barriers of industrial verticals.

Now, imagine the evolution in the business model, the number of channels and touchpoints through which brands are engaging with the customers, the path to purchase, customer support, content and media types. It’s mind boggling. There is a fundamental fragmentation that exists within the entire ecosystem, from organizational models to operating structures.

Most brands take a tactical bottom up approach to handle this fragmented landscape in parts and silos. Unless we apply “systems thinking” that, at least on paper, shows all the subcomponents of the organization humming together, we are still far away from delivering the level of customer experience that customers demand today.

A systems mindset is the only way to truly bring the customer at the center of a connected ecosystem.

This applies centrally to modern marketing because of the same explosion of channels, touchpoints, media and content types, and the role marketing needs to play with sales, product, engineering, finance. A systems mindset is the only way to truly bring the customer at the center of a connected ecosystem that goes longitudinally alongside the customer journey.

Even just putting that on paper is the beginning of eventually making it real.

Thank you, Mayur!

Want to hear Mayur speak in person? Join us at the next MarTech conference in San Francisco, May 9-11, where leading practitioners and experts like Mayur will share their experiences and insights at the evolving intersection of marketing, technology, and management.

The post Start 2017 with the world’s most famous chief marketing technologist appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Had your fill of millennial marketing articles lately? Even the millennials themselves are like, “Don’t you marketers have anything else to talk about? Let me eat my drone-delivered Domino’s pizza in peace.”

So it was refreshing to connect with Gaurav Bhatia, vice president of digital strategy for AARP Services and head of digital for Influent50, a full-service marketing agency that’s a division of AARP Services, to talk about marketing technology applied in the service of different generations.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your career before your role at the AARP?

I am a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree in information technology and an MBA. When I started my career, I had a role in finance for Sabre, where I learned how software powered travel reservations systems and airline operations and drove commerce.

I took a few different roles at Sabre — parent of Travelocity.com, now owned by Expedia — in strategy, product development, and marketing, where we built consumer-facing products working closely with the business and the technical team.

After that I worked with Capital One in the online group, as well as a technology company, NIIT Technologies, before taking a role as the vice president of digital strategy for AARP Services. These different roles in consumer experience, strategy, technology, marketing, finance, and analytics really helped me understand the entire the consumer ecosystem.

Different roles in consumer experience, strategy, technology, marketing, finance, and analytics really helped me understand the entire the consumer ecosystem.

2. What is your role at AARP Services? What does it entail?

We are part of AARP. At AARP Services, I am responsible for strategy, product development, user design, and digital technology and operations across the different digital channels — web, mobile, social media, and e-mail.

Our team, which is matrixed across the organization, is responsible for managing our digital strategy and the development and execution of digital capabilities for products and services across digital platforms. Our charter is to create creating customer-centric digital solutions to meet our member needs.

Our 37 million plus member base is reall embracing digital and using digital channels to engage with our brand, product, and services. We are seeing growth in all of our digital channels. We want to ensure we can build experiences that allow members to get the information they are looking for on the channel of their choice.

3. How did this journey of building out the new generation of AARP Services new digital interface to the world go? What were the biggest challenges?

We started out by thinking about the future state: where digital will fit in the member journey, strategy and the interaction with our brand. The data and the trends highlighted the growth of digital among the 50+ demographic. Also, the Boomers control 70% of the US disposal income and spend more than 2 trillion annually. These were business and technology trends that helped build the business case.

We started out by thinking about the future state: where digital will fit in the member journey, strategy and the interaction with our brand.

The opportunity was to look forward three years out on where we wanted to be. Then, we evaluated our current digital state in terms of user experience, technology platforms, data platform, and infrastructure.

Our challenges from a digital point of view were similar to many other organizations. Previous capabilities and systems had been built to serve a business need at an earlier point in time. We had done that as well, and it had resulted in a mix of technologies and experiences that had inconsistencies, were difficult to scale, and were getting operationally complex to manage.

So we set out with a bold agenda of creating a new experience on a future-ready platform that would better serve member and business needs.

The biggest challenge we faced was the scale of transformation required. It was like building a new car and running the old car at the same time.

The biggest challenge we faced was the scale of transformation required to make this happen. It was a big undertaking. It was like building a new car and running the old car at the same time. To make matters more complex, it was transporting the passengers from old car (old digital experience) to new car (new digital experience) while going at 100 miles an hour.

We had to maintain the existing digital experience and create the new experience at the same time. We needed to build the user experience, which was responsive, build and customize the marketing automation platform, analytics platform, databases, and a whole new infrastructure. As part of this new digital experience, we were adding new capabilities like A/B testing and personalization, implementing an omni-channel view.

Besides the digital experience and technology pieces, we were working with marketing, operations, and legal teams to ensure we addressed all the business and compliance needs and worked in an agile manner to build the experience.

4. How much of this was technology change vs. organizational change?

It was both a technology change and an organizational change. As part of the transformation, we were incorporating new processes that would drive automation and improved efficiency, which in turn would increase our ability to be agile and make changes faster, reducing internal touchpoints and manual processes.

It was both a technology change and an organizational change. We were incorporating new processes that would drive automation and improved efficiency.

The technology enables us to be more agile, run multiple tests and campaigns across multiple digital channels, and measure the impact. Technology gives us the platform to centralize our digital assets and work across channels in tandem — instead of a siloed, channel-centric approach.

But it was organizational transformation that embodied process changes and introduced new ways of doing things. That in turn required adding new skills and support to manage the change.

5. Can you describe the team that you organized for this? What were their roles? What about now as you shift from building to operating it?

We wanted to keep a lean team during the build phase, so we leveraged internal teams and agencies to help in the initial phases of build and deploy.

We are a matrixed organization, so the core team had people from marketing working very closely with the digital team. The digital team had user experience and design, solution architects, designers, analytics, developers, and infrastructure team members. We assembled a small core team that led the project from business requirements to implementation. That core team would work with an extended team across the organization.

Once we launched the new experience, our focus was less on new features and functionality, and more on ensuring we could operationalize — building the team to manage and grow it. We added content management, personalization, and split testing individuals who could help support that growth. Now, we are more integrated with the marketing and business teams to ensure we can jointly plan and execute against strategic initiatives.

6. What was your collaboration like with IT on this project? What did you learn from that process?

We worked hand-in-hand with the IT team to ensure that we were following the corporate governance process and leveraging the systems and capabilities that existed. We were focused on the entire digital ecosystem — user experience across channels, technology stack, data analytics, data security, back-end platforms, and infrastructure, so we collaborated with the different team within the organization.

We worked hand-in-hand with the IT team to ensure that we were following the corporate governance process and leveraging the systems and capabilities that existed.

We brought in the teams early on in the discovery and strategy process, to ensure we could make the right decisions early on. Our goal was to leverage the capability we had internally and build the capability we did not have.

Since we were on a path of creating “the new experience,” we were essentially adding new products and solutions for our members. We spent time walking the extended teams through the vision and goals of the project, and sought out to collaborate early on in the process. Our biggest learning was how to create alignment within the organization and ensure we had the key teams involved in the process.

7. What information do you have now that you didn’t have before? How is that changing decision-making in the organization? Are there broader cultural shifts happening as a result?

As part of building this new experience, we invested in the right technology stack, a data and analytics engine that would enable us to get a holistic view of the member. We also wanted to ensure that it was easy to use and that time-to-market would be significantly reduced.

For example, to launch a digital campaign across channels, we don’t need support from IT — we can now deploy across web, mobile, social and email and measure the results quickly. We have the capability to target and personalize based on member preferences. We can then modify and change our marketing spend if we see positive results in certain channels and low performance in others.

These capabilities allow us to be nimble and make data-driven decisions for our marketing spend. Allowing for personalization and targeting based on member preferences drives better value for the members and our organization.

We are very early on in the process, but we’ve already seen positive results across the board.

The landscape keeps on evolving, and we want to continue to keep an eye on new experiences.

Thank you, Gaurav!

Readers: if you’re looking for more insights on marketing technology management at major brands, be sure to check out our upcoming MarTech Europe conference in London, November 1-2. You can use the code “MarTechInsider” (case sensitive, without the quotes) to receive an extra 10% discount.

The post Digital transformation at the AARP, from old to new appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Duane Schulz, chief marketing technologist at Xerox, is a marketing technologist’s marketing technologist.

One of the true pioneers of this hybrid profession, Duane has forged a number of great marketing technology management practices at Xerox, a highly-distributed $18 billion company with over 100,000 employees worldwide — no small feat.

I’m delighted that Duane graciously agreed to share his experience with us here in a Q&A.

1. Tell us a bit a about your background — what did your career path look like?

I started as a medium-company IT manager, which helped me get immersed in system design/thinking, coding, operations, and applying technology to deliver business impact. That eventually brought me to Hewlett-Packard and then Apple, where I became a product strategy and management leader, facilitating seminal market disruptions like HP’s DeskJet and early digital photography — the growth hacking of the 80s.

I joined Xerox through an acquisition after two startups and led a new ventures practice, eventually taking roles leading digital, social and marketing operations. As we matured our digital and marketing operations practices, the need to tackle marketing technology as a focused executive priority became clear.

2. What’s your current role at Xerox? What does that entail?

I’m our chief marketing technologist (CMT), and am also responsible for our digital, social, and content marketing team and global brand practice.

In the CMT role, I’m responsible for developing our strategy for using marketing technology platforms to materially impact our business performance, while at the same time developing strong competencies that progress our global marketing practice, ensuring that our marketing community are solid contemporary marketers.

One critical distinction about our CMT practice is that I’m a solo executive practitioner in that role and don’t manage the operations of the platforms involved — aside from my digital responsibilities — so I can be an impartial consultant, evangelist, advisor, and teacher.

3. How do marketing and IT work together at Xerox? Where do responsibilities split? How has that changed over time, and what role do you, as chief marketing technologist, play in bridging these two organizations?

Marketing and IT work closely on our marketing stack and how it integrates into our IT strategy and core architecture, and this relationship is a primary element of my charter. We have worked hard in the last couple of years to build stronger ties with our IT organization — and made good progress clarifying and understanding our respective value-add in the mission.

Marketing and IT work closely on our marketing stack and how it integrates into our IT strategy and core architecture, and this relationship is a primary element of my charter.

In general, most of our marketing technology applications are operated by marketing groups and our businesses. When we get into transactional apps, data management, e-commerce, sales, back-end systems and integration of marketing apps with those systems — and of course privacy and security — IT leads the charge and owns the space.

In many ways, a CMT is a marketing-based IT strategist, and I can’t do that without close relations with IT and trust between us. My background in IT, code, app design and infrastructure helps bridge our respective points of view.

It’s vital that we marketers aren’t just charging off with rogue actions and creating messes that our IT partners eventually need to clean up. And IT needs to be comfortable with business-led applications as a new modality as well. There’s natural tension between these dynamics across the industry, and developing collaborative relationships is key. I really appreciate my partners in IT.

4. As a global, multi-business company, how does Xerox balance the trade-offs between centralization and more distributed leadership in marketing, particularly with regard to marketing technology?

We operate a distributed business model, with marketing teams in our many lines of business in document technology and services and business process services. That said, we have a strong cadre of centralized shared marketing services directly reporting to our CMO John Kennedy — paid media, communications, experiential, brand, digital, and an emerging demand and sales enablement center.

Our business marketers handle things associated with offerings, prospects, messaging, go-to-market and close-to-the-client marketing — while the corporate teams operate centers of excellence.

We’ve arranged our marketing technology to enable freedom for our business marketers where it’s appropriate, but established strong standards in the case of core applications that apply to the broad community.

We’ve arranged our marketing technology to enable freedom for our business marketers where it’s appropriate, but established strong standards in the case of core applications that apply to the broad community. Some platforms are only operated in the center (Drupal, WordPress, etc.), others are standards that are offered to each group, e.g., social monitoring or publishing (Synthesio and Spredfast in our case).

5. In a similar vein, how do you encourage experimentation and exploratory innovation while still providing a structure for scalability? Is it harder to ignite that fire or control it?

We run annual audits of marketing technology at Xerox, and early on I devised a construct to arrange them across a continuum, from one-off or early-adoption platforms to vital and broadly-applicable applications. We arranged the platforms into three categories: mainstream, satellite, and independent. And we adopted and communicated a martech strategy that encouraged experimentation across the business for independent platforms, at the same time declaring about 15 platforms as mainstream.

We arranged the platforms into three categories: mainstream, satellite, and independent.

We communicated that it’s okay to try new tools, just keep us posted at the center on what you are doing, so we can share the experience and outcomes across our marketing teams. And don’t think you get to go out and choose a new marketing automation platform to supplant the standard (Marketo in our case).

What we didn’t see until we backed away from this thinking was that we had built a taxonomy that mirrors the software architecture model of Core-Adjacent-Edge. And it turns out that we have a 70-20-10 investment split between these categories, while we have an essentially flipped count of applications against that model.

6. With all the changes in marketing and marketing technology today, how do build capabilities and competencies in the broader marketing team to harness the potential of these new tools?

I think this is where Xerox is taking a creative and strategic approach. While we arranged the platforms into the structure I laid out above, we asked ourselves, “What are the capabilities we are trying to develop with these platforms?” It’s common to arrange the stack around platforms’ purpose, we thought of this as a fulcrum to develop our contemporary marketing skill and performance and to envision a future state.

We settled on six capabilities that merged these ideas, and built a three-plus year vision for a progression of maturity for these capabilities (full disclosure: we leveraged Allocadia’s Sam Melnick’s “layers” model and IDC’s Gerry Murray’s martech maturity model, adapting the concepts to our situation).

7. Do you have a vision for how marketing technology will evolve at Xerox over the next several years? How do you balance a strategically concrete roadmap with the flexibility to respond to new emergent developments?

The progression axis of the model above is our best shot at the future evolution. As you know, Xerox will be separating into two companies, Xerox and Conduent, in 2017, so these journeys may differ as the business’ needs and marketing opportunities unfold. That said, this is an agile space, and we’ll revisit our progression model periodically.

To facilitate the evolution, we have taken our full stack and published it on a responsive website to allow all of our marketers to discover all that’s already in use across the company, reach out to ask for advicem or tell us about new platforms they are going to trial. As these experiments unfold, they’ll organically influence our future state. Think of it as “user-driven martech.”

8. Any advice you’d offer to someone starting out their career in marketing today?

Get very comfortable with fundamental martech tools, hone your creative and storytelling skills, and fearlessly dig into data exploration, analytics, insights, and visualization. I believe the future of marketing is in the hands of people who can compose a compelling blog post with personally-generated creative, while laying a few lines of Javascript and building a visualization of the results of the post with some code from D3.

The future of marketing is in the hands of people who can compose a compelling blog post with personally-generated creative, while laying a few lines of Javascript and building a visualization of the results.

Oh, and don’t take anything martech vendors tell you at face value. Questions?

Thanks, Duane!

The post Insights from the chief marketing technologist of an $18B firm appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

I recently had the chance to talk with Jeff Pedowitz, the founder and president of Pedowitz Group, a marketing services provider built around the transformative potential of marketing technology platforms. As a terrific example of this new breed of agency, I was very interested in his perspective on several of the most popular marketing technology topics being discussed these days.

1. What was your professional background before launching Pedowitz Group?

I started my career owning and operating 35 Subway sandwich stores in New Jersey. From there I moved into enterprise software, working for Computer Associates and SmartTime, holding roles in professional services and marketing. After this, I started my second business in sales training. I then went to Salesnet, an early competitor of Salesforce, working in the channel organization.

There, I was introduced to Eloqua in 2003 as a means to generate leads for our resellers. As they say, I found my calling and true passion. I loved it so much that I went to work at Eloqua as their first VP of Professional Services.

2. What was the spark behind starting the Pedowitz Group — what opportunity did you see in the market?

As VP of Professional Services for Eloqua, our team was developing new processes and best practices for demand generation all the time. We were responsible for training many of the early partners on how to do it. I saw all the money they were making with our training and figured I could do it as well if not better.

In the beginning, I truly thought it would be a lifestyle business, working 2 weeks a month and playing golf the rest of the time. After 30 days, I had more work than I could handle and reassessed the market opportunity. I saw that it could be something much bigger and way more special.

3. How utilized is marketing automation today? What holds back firms from utilizing it more fully?

There is such a greenfield for firms to adopt marketing automation. There are maybe 20,000 or so companies worldwide that have invested in one of the leading platforms. There are millions of businesses that are either using nothing or siloed components to drive demand.

There is such a greenfield for firms to adopt marketing automation. Millions of businesses are either using nothing or siloed components.

Of those that have bought, on average they are using about 15-20% of the available functionality. Lack of fuller adoption is based on several factors: resource availability, skill development, comprehensive functionality, use cases and process improvement.

All companies big and small struggle with resourcing. They never have enough to do all the things they need to in a given week. To be successful using marketing automation, it requires dedicated commitment and resources. Often times, employees are wearing multiple hats and scrambling to finish a variety of tasks. They don’t have the time to invest in using the platforms to their full potential.

Today’s platforms have evolved considerably from their early predecessors. They require a significant amount of skill, training, and knowledge to operate the entire stack. Many companies do not realize the amount of time they need to invest in training and skill development for their employees to truly become power users of these platforms.

The vendors have done a great job of building out functionality as they move into new markets and verticals. But the average customer is still using the basics — email, behavioral tracking, opportunity tracking, and CRM integration. Many have not begun to use lead scoring, triggers, omni-channel, personalization, or advanced segmentation.

The average customer is still using the basics. Many have not begun to use lead scoring, triggers, omni-channel, personalization, or advanced segmentation.

Vendors are starting to develop broader and more comprehensive training programs for their install base to address this. Without defining what you want to accomplish with marketing automation and developing the process improvements first, there will always be a disconnect between what the system can do and what you are telling it to do. As they say, garbage in leads to garbage out.

4. Single-vendor integrated suite or best-of-breed marketing stacks — what’s your view?

Ah, the age old debate.

Honestly, it depends upon what your goals and objectives are. A single suite offers tight integration, a single platform, consolidated data and tighter reporting. But it might not do everything the way you need it to, or go deep enough in a certain area to address your particular needs.

Best of breed allows you to selectively shop and address exactly what you want, but then there is a lot of work to integrate and consolidate data and reporting — and ultimately this is more expensive. Tough trade offs. I recommend that each company sit down and develop a thorough business and technical requirements document for their short and long term needs and then make decisions based on that.

5. We hear a lot about agile marketing, but as marketers, do you think we face the risk of running too fast these days? Is something getting lost, and if so, how do we recover it?

I think in today’s market speed is critically important, and without figuring out how to be more agile and move faster, you will fall behind.

That said, going fast and being agile is not a substitute for good planning and decision making. Companies should slow down before they speed up — build the right plan, validate their assumptions, get their data tight, improve targeting and segmentation, and of course have a thorough content plan. Without doing these things first, being agile means just making mistakes faster and will not set you up for long term success.

Going fast and being agile is not a substitute for good planning and decision making. Companies should slow down before they speed up.

6. What advice would you give to new marketers starting out in this field?

Be prepared to learn at an accelerated rate and embrace change. Today’s professionals are learning more every 3 months than they did in 4 years of undergrad. The market is changing all the time. New technology, disruptive forces. Change is a constant.

Invest in your career and don’t assume that your company will train you on everything that you need. There is an abundance of resources on the web where a marketer at any skill level can learn and grow.

7. What do you think might be the biggest disruption in marketing ahead?

I am not sure it is a disruptor but definitely a big trend: data and BI to me are leading the pack. With all the technology and channels feeding into marketing, data is everywhere. The companies that learn how to harness data, and develop meaningful insights and intelligence from it, will quickly outpace their competition.

Companies that learn how to harness data, and develop meaningful insights and intelligence from it, will quickly outpace their competition.

I am personally fascinated with AI and voice. The Amazon Echo and Google Home are driving incredible innovation around the connection of IoT. That innovation will break into business shortly and the possibilities are endless.

Imagine sitting in the conference room and just saying, “Alexa, what customers should we target next week and what would you recommend the offer be”. Alexa responds with “based on an analysis of your data, we believe you should go after these 5 customers in the financial vertical and use the ROI calculator for the call to action.” An exciting future for sure.

Thanks, Jeff!

The post How utilized is marketing automation today? An expert weighs in appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The following is another great guest Q&A conducted by Claire Schoen, an interview with Sheldon Monteiro of SapientNitro, who will be one of our featured speakers at MarTech later this month.

Sheldon Monteiro, Global Chief Technology Officer of SapientNitro, has spent more than twenty years working at the crossroads of customer experience and technology, as a technologist and also as a driving force for change in how marketers, storytellers and technologists work together to create immersive and engaging customer experiences. We recently spoke with him about his role at SapientNitro, his views on marketing and technology, and what we can expect to hear from him at the upcoming MarTech Conference.

Keep reading for an up close and personal interview with Sheldon, and then secure your place to meet him at MarTech.

What is your role at SapientNitro?

As our global CTO, I have two primary roles. The first is the client side. I work with our client teams, partnering with our clients to help them realize a better future for their business, by creating transformative experiences and business models that improve their customers’ lives.
Technology — search, social, and mobility — has shifted power to consumers, who expect two-way dialog and exceptional service from brands.

SapientNitro works with clients in several industries — retail, financial services, automotive, travel & hospitality, healthcare, and telecommunications. Across these industries, marketing and brand building is more important than ever.

But brand building has evolved. We help our clients transform to create entire ecosystems, where their brand story comes to life at every customer touchpoint — whether that be advertising communications, a brand website or mobile application, an in-store or in-venue experience, or even using new formats like augmented or virtual reality. We imagine, build and evolve these experiences, and all the systems and processes that support them, including the gnarly legacy systems in the data center. Our goal is for our clients to move beyond making ads to creating worlds where their story becomes part of the consumer’s story.

What I enjoy most about this part of my role is the interdisciplinary nature of the work — strategists, marketers, brand creatives, data scientists, mobile and front-end technologists, enterprise technologists, business and technology operations — all working together with our clients in pursuit of exceptional consumer experiences and business outcomes. The variety of business, marketing and technology problems we get to solve is breathtaking. I have the privilege of presiding over stuff that would have made Issac Asimov faint dead away in astonishment. The technology we design, install and manage was unimagined when I was born. This is really cool stuff.

That’s the client side. In addition, internally within SapientNitro, I focus on evolving our technology capabilities and how we work. Our global footprint allows us to distribute work to locations with the best talent and economics. We have 6,000 technologists at SapientNitro, and I am accountable for what we do, where we do it, and our engineering practices including DevOps, methodology, and tools.

I spend a lot of time thinking about talent development, how our teams and clients collaborate, and the systems, processes and culture to ensure exceptional quality and predictable delivery. What I love about this part of my role is the potential to rethink the entire service delivery chain to create an amazing workplace, help our people realize their fullest potential, and improve not just what we do, but the experience our clients have working with us.

Tell me a little bit about your background.

I had a nomadic childhood. Ours was a close-knit family, but my parents moved around a lot — I attended 6 different schools and 4 colleges. Sadly, I don’t have a single grade school friend I’m in touch with today. But for what I lost in roots, I gained in perspective: different cultures, types of people, value systems, and educational experiences. It had a huge impact on how I think, and on my attitude towards change. It doesn’t mean I like disruptive change more or less than anybody else, but I have the benefit of many years of learning to accept radical change as part of everyday life.

Immediately after college, where I majored in physics and computer science, I found myself in Thailand, where a vacation turned into a two-year stint building systems for the financial industry — more specifically, graphical trading systems for brokers at the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

Working with brokers was a phenomenal experience. These folks live on volatility. They don’t just accept it — more volatility literally means more opportunities to make money, and they need the information and technology to exploit that volatility. Little did I know, thriving in volatility would serve me well years later in marketing technology.

After grad school, I was fortunate to have a number of job opportunities. One of those was with a fast growing technology services company in Boston, promising a focus on culture, teamwork, and cool technology to solve customer problems. On my first visit to their offices, I was blown away by the people, open spaces, and design centers where they conducted customer workshops. Two weeks later, I signed up with Sapient as an entry-level engineer as employee #196.

Sapient has changed a lot over the past 20 years. Today, we are over 12,000 people and well north of a billion in revenues. Here, I’ve had incredible opportunities to be an entrepreneur, to do amazing work, and to break new boundaries with innovative technology. Like my childhood, Sapient is close-knit, but we prosper on — and even instigate — change as a way of life.

What will you be speaking about at the MarTech Conference?

Thom Langford, ‎Chief Information Security Officer of Publicis Groupe, and I will be doing a presentation titled “Level Up Your Martech Information Security Smarts in 8 Steps.”

In a research survey we conducted at the very first MarTech conference, one key finding was that information security was dead last in the self-reported current skill sets of practicing marketing technologists. Contrast this with the number and devastating impact caused by security breaches and incidents we’ve seen over the past 24 months across industries and the public sector. Real damage has been done and the stakes are getting higher every day.

Marketing technologists have a duty — a mandate — to develop trustworthy systems that are secure, reliable, and available. Thom and I will be speaking about marketing technologists’ roles as stewards in the area of information security and how they can level up to this responsibility.

Any advice for a newly minted college graduate going into marketing?

Simply, if you want to succeed in a career you need to be good at more than one thing. It used to be that we’d develop a depth in one skill, and then as our careers progressed, we acquired broad but shallow coverage of other skills, otherwise known as the T-shaped leader.

Things have changed.

Today, individuals who combine technical depth, business acumen, creative flair, and the ability to inspire and lead others are needed at all levels. Smart creative, marketing technologist, digital strategist, data scientist — the hot roles today are unicorns that span more than one discipline. If you were a STEM major, study marketing and creative fields. If you were an art major, learn to code. Be curious. Seek diversity. Paint outside the lines. Say “yes” to new challenges. And build strong and lasting relationships with people who are not like you.

What do you like to do in your free time — hobbies?

I love my Kamado cooker (aka “The Big Green Egg”) and use it all the time. There’s nothing like being able to fire up the grill for a low and slow cook in the dead of winter in Chicago. Of course being who I am, my grill has all manner of gadgets — IoT enabled thermometers and vents to self-regulate. And, if the temperature drifts out of range, my Android Wear watch buzzes and tells me so.

Thank you Claire and Sheldon!

The post Marketing technologist to Isaac Asimov: eat your heart out appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The following is another guest Q&A conducted by Claire Schoen, an interview with Rohit Prabhakar of McKesson, who will be one of our featured speakers at MarTech next month.

Rohit Prabhakar is the Head of Digital Marketing Strategy and Marketing Technologies at McKesson. His LinkedIn profile succinctly sums up his experience and outlook as “sales & marketing guy at heart and technologist by training.” We sat down with him recently to discuss his background and his current role in transforming the digital marketing environment at one of the world’s largest healthcare corporations.

Keep reading for an up close and personal interview with Rohit. Then secure your place to meet him at MarTech.

How do you get to where you are now in your career?

You might say that mine is a “story of association” — that my career has been influenced by the people I’ve associated with. There are so many family members, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and unknowns who helped me along the way. For example, I graduated with a degree in medical science, but I had a friend — a mentor of sorts — who was really into computers. He was so enthusiastic about them I thought I had to give it a try as well. So I took a course in Java and found out I was good at it — and really, really liked it. I thought, “I’ve found the right place.”

So I started working in software engineering and eventually rose to software architect and then became a project manager. I love technology, but I also love business. And I love networking with people. One day, my manager pulled me aside and said they were going to move me over to sales. Just like that, I was in charge of sales for a financial company!

After about two years in sales, I went to Copart where I was part of the technology team, but because of my sales background I was also working on marketing. That’s where I first I saw a big gap between IT and marketing. Marketing hated us (IT) and we hated marketing. I thought, “That’s not right, I want to fix this.” So I spent the next year working to bring the two teams closer together.

A year later I was recruited to join McKesson, and I found a similar gap between marketing and technology, and once again, I thought “I want to fix this.” So I set out to build a business case to integrate marketing and technology on a global scale within McKesson, with help and guidance from my SVP. It took me three and a half years, and a lot of people told me it couldn’t be done, but in December 2014 it was approved. That was our Christmas present, an approval of a three-year road map for McKesson Marketing.

How did you get the 3-year plan approved?

I spent a year and a half on the road, travelling across the McKesson organizations. It wasn’t easy, and I had to convince people of something that required a transformation of marketing within this large global organization. Some people thought I was crazy, and told me it wasn’t going to work. “We tried already and it didn’t work,” they said.

But we had a data-focused presentation. This wasn’t just a sales road show to convince people. We had the data to support our proposal. Once the business case got traction, with help of my VP and his directs, we got heavily engaged with each BU to get their backing for the executive approval. In the end, we got everyone on board, and we now have a Digital Marketing Center of Excellence within McKesson.

The Digital Marketing Center of Excellence is responsible for innovation, setting up the best practices, providing marketing technology infrastructure, implementing and improving marketing processes and governance across all business units and marketing functions at McKesson.

What does the plan entail?

The plan involved four key areas:

1. Building the marketing technology stack for the entire global organization.
2. Implementing specific projects associated with marketing technology.
3. Building out resources, hiring people and building the right team.
4. Building a learning center, which we are calling the Digital Marketing Academy.

The plan did not involve any significant re-organization within McKesson, but we have added resources to build expertise in like customer experience, SEO, marketing automation, analytics, and content marketing. We’ve made great progress in all areas, and have just hired some rockstars, so now that I have this team in place I can focus more on strategy.

Where do you sit within the McKesson organization?

The Digital Center of Excellence is part of Corporate Marketing. Marketing and IT are two separate departments, but we are joined at the hip, and the departments work very closely together. Because of my background, I am a big proponent of the IT department as a separate department. Some marketing organizations create “shadow IT” teams — IT groups that actually sit within marketing — but I don’t think that’s as effective.

Your presentation at the MarTech conference is “Marketing Technology to Enable Customer Obsession.” Why that topic?

For me, the two most important things in marketing are customer obsession and demand generation. As marketers, really, these are the two things we focus on: getting more eyeballs to our websites and getting more qualified leads, right? So in my presentation I want to focus on the first, which I call customer obsession, and which has to do with how marketing technology can enable the customer experience and our overall obsession with delivering what the customer truly wants.

Most of us in marketing technology have reached the point where we understand the “marketing stack,” and have enough of the technology in place that it’s time to focus on how we can best us this to enable our customer obsession.

What would you tell someone who is just getting started in marketing technology?

Everyone’s different, so I don’t really like to give general advice, but here are some suggestions:

• Admit that you don’t know everything.
• Be hungry to learn. Go to conferences, ask your peers, talk to everyone you work with — at your company and at others. Learn. Learn. Learn.
• Be ready to fail more times than you want to.
• Accept change and be ready to run at the speed of it.
• It’s all about influence.

Can you share one thing about you that we wouldn’t learn from your LinkedIn profile?

I’m never afraid to reach out to someone I don’t know, especially if I can learn from them.
I love to read. And, I love to cook.

Thank you Claire and Rohit!

The post Marketing hated IT, and IT hated marketing — and that wasn’t right appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The following is a guest Q&A conducted by Claire Schoen of Third Door Media, the producers of the MarTech conference series. Claire interviews Laura Patterson, president & co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, who will be one of our featured speakers at MarTech next month.

As President of VisionEdge Marketing (VEM), Laura Patterson is a champion of performance-driven marketing. An early pioneer in the science side of marketing, she is the author of the book “Marketing Metrics in Action.” Before VEM, Laura spent 20 years in industry, including fourteen years at Motorola, where she began in sales and ultimately became Director of Customer Marketing and Brand Strategy.

We recently spoke with Laura about her thoughts on how marketers can earn better grades from the C-suite, and why it’s so important to thoroughly understand the marketing process before adopting and using technology.

Keep reading for an up close and personal interview with Laura. Then secure your place to meet her at MarTech. Register today!

Tell me about your background — how did you end up where you are now?

I entered the world of marketing in the late 70s, well before marketers had anything like the technology we employ today. (Remember the blank computer screens with blinking green lights?!) For nearly 20 years, I worked on the corporate side of marketing – financial services, healthcare, enterprise and application software and hardware. There have been a lot of changes!

While at Motorola, my customers included tech companies like Apple, Cisco, Logitech — companies that were building out the technologies we’re using today.

In 1999, I made the switch to consulting. As a data-driven, tech person, I wanted to combine my marketing strategy and customer experience work with my marketing science and operations background. We formed VisionEdge Marketing to help marketers use data and science to measure and improve their marketing. That was 17 years ago.

Right from the start, we focused on helping our customers make their marketing customer-centric, measurable, and actionable — words that no one was using at the time. This is still our focus.

You’ve done some recent research about marketer personas. Can you share what you learned?

For 15 years, we’ve been conducting the marketing performance management study. As a result of the data, we’ve identified three personas: Value Creators, Sales Enablers, and Campaign Producers. The Campaign Producers are the most “traditional” marketers, those who create content, build campaigns and websites, and manage events, etc. The Sales Enablers see themselves “in service” to the sales team, and their job is all about generating leads with their primary focus on the pipeline.

The Value Creators, however, are more focused on how to align marketing to the overall business strategy, to create and extract value, and to move the business needle. They’re the ones earning the “A”s from the C-suite.

What are these “A” marketers doing differently? They’re spending the time to develop business acumen and learn the language of the business. They’re not just focused on output statistics like downloads, pageviews, open rates, fans/followers, leads, etc. Their marketing operations expand beyond automation to serve in a more strategic role designed to transform Marketing into a Center of Excellence. While all marketers today are digging deep into the realm of data, the A marketers know exactly what data they need and why, because they are focused on the bigger picture. They make their data more relevant to the business and use the data to help them align their efforts to business outcomes. Not sales outcomes, business outcomes.

Theirs is a longer term, overall market view, looking at issues such as how to build customer loyalty, improve customer experience, and when and where to expand products. These are the marketers that are getting the attention of the C-suite.

When marketers can successfully combine business acumen with customer insights and relevant data, they become more credible to the C-suite — and thus more influential within the organization.

What will you cover in your presentation at the MarTech conference?

The presentation is titled “With Credibility Comes Influence and Relevance: How You Can Employ Performance Management to Achieve All Three.”

In this session I’ll share more insights about how marketers can learn from these “Value Creators” to gain better marks and drive marketing success within the organization. Specifically, I’ll share six areas where best-in-class marketers are excelling, as well as how marketers can use performance-based marketing to improve the value of marketing.
What are your thoughts on where we are now with marketing technology?

So many marketers are focused on the tools when they really need to understand the systems and processes first. My dad was a handyman, and he had a great expression: “If you don’t have the skill to use a tool, then using a power tool will only enable you to do more damage, faster.”

There are two things here, really. First, before you even pick up a tool, you need to understand the process and the system for using it within your business. For example, you need to understand why you’re sending an email before you concern yourself with building out a branded template. What are you trying to accomplish and how will you measure your success?

Second, you need to know which data is relevant before you pull it. So many marketers are getting bad marks from the C-suite because they’ve purchased all kinds of marketing tools and are presenting all sorts of data, but too much of it is not relevant. The C-suite is saying “you’re giving us all these numbers, but we don’t get the sense that you’re moving the business needle.”

We’re at a point where marketers now have the power tools, but they don’t have all the skills to use them effectively.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out in marketing?

Be willing to work hard. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and be willing to say “I don’t know” when you don’t. I also think it’s important to understand the process, to be able to map out workflow and really understand the “why” of what you are doing. You need to know the process before you learn the tool.

And — this may sound obvious — don’t be afraid to pick up the phone to solve a problem. I recently had an issue with one of our martech platforms and it took 10 days of back-and-forth email before someone finally called me. We solved the problem in 5 minutes once we were on the phone. That’s 10 days use of that platform gone.

Tell me something we might not learn from your LinkedIn profile.

I used to run triathlons but I’ve given that up and now do yoga, which I find to be both a great workout and a great way to reduce stress.

And I love hardware stores. (I’m enamored with power tools.)

Thank you Claire and Laura!

The post How Marketers Can Earn Better Grades From The C-Suite appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Alongside the explosion of marketing technology, we’re also seeing some new titles cropping up in big organizations to handle this ecosystem. One is VP of marketing technology. Since this type of role is so new, we took some time to sit down with Chris Bledsoe, VP of marketing technology, at Fool.com, a publishing company dedicated to helping the world invest smarter.

Chris has an interesting journey. He started as a software engineer, but his enthusiasm for growing businesses and personal hack projects kindled his interest in marketing. He started the first marketing technology group at Fool.com, where for the first time, engineers were embedded in the marketing team to help empower them to use the systems they need to be more efficient. Chris muses on his role, and what would lead an engineer this direction.

1. So what does being a “VP of marketing technology” really mean? How did that role develop and what are you responsible for?

As a VP of marketing technology at Fool.com, I lead the strategy for how our marketing team brings on new technology, develop the implementation roadmap, and manage requests for marketing managers across the organization.

Rather than having an isolated group of engineers support marketing requests part-time, we’ve embedded our technical team into the marketing department. This has been a huge win for us in terms of providing better service to our marketers and increasing efficiency across the organization. The marketing tech team I lead reports to our technology department, and I report to the chief digital officer, who oversees our FoolMakers marketing group.

Rather than having an isolated group of engineers support marketing requests part-time, we’ve embedded our technical team into the marketing department.

Day to day, this means I work closely with marketing managers to determine what software needs they have and how we can solve them. These conversations might lead to building solutions internally or evaluating and implementing third-party tools and services. I take all of their requests and prioritize our tech team’s backlog to make sure we are working on the highest impact requests and delivering the most value for our marketing managers.

The role evolved in an interesting way. I was originally a software developer at Fool.com, then moved into a business position, and eventually became a marketing manager. As I worked with the tools that our marketers were working with, I noticed opportunities to improve the technology stack and the marketers’ workflows. Eventually that led me into my current role as VP of marketing technology.

2. How did marketing get engineering projects done before your group joined the marketing organization?

Prior to the existence of our marketing technology team, when someone in the company had a marketing technology need, they would go to the CTO and make a case for solving that need. Examples of these requests include integrating with an email service provider, developing interactive video plugins for a video sales letter, or even designing a welcome campaign email series.

If the request for a particular tech project was approved, an engineering team was formed to solve that task. After the task was completed, the tech team would disband and the developers would move onto other projects.

Moving to an embedded engineering team has allowed us to build better workflows and create efficiencies for our marketers.

Moving to an embedded engineering team has allowed us to more closely align our marketing tech stack with our other tech systems, build better workflows, and create efficiencies for our marketers. It’s also easier to prioritize projects, because we are all working towards the same top-level goals.

Since this was so successful, we’ve added resources over time, and we’re scaling out the embedded team concept to other areas of the company outside of marketing.

Since this was so successful, we’re scaling out the embedded team concept to other areas of the company outside of marketing.

3. What skills are needed to work in marketing technology? What interests would lead an engineer this direction?

Since the role is new and evolving, a marketing technologist means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The role varies widely but usually involves some mix of marketing, analytics, and engineering. The deeper the understanding of each of these areas is, the more valuable the marketing technologist can be.

The role varies widely but usually involves some mix of marketing, analytics, and engineering.

For many companies, marketing technologists are marketers who have a basic understanding of technology. For other companies, they are software developers with marketing backgrounds.

I’ve been a full-time developer, written marketing copy, optimized landing pages for conversion, and even been a marketing manager before. This background and experience has allowed me to better understand our marketing manager’s needs and design better systems and automation around their workflows.

As to what interests would lead an engineer in this direction, I’d say a general interest and appreciation of business and marketing, as well as a desire to scale a business using technology. Since I started both writing code and running my first Internet business at a very young age, this field was sort of natural for me.

4. What are your favorite marketing tech tools?

There are many awesome tools in the marketing tech space right now. I’m sure you’ve seen this blog’s marketing technology landscape. It’s fascinating how quickly this space is growing, and I love that there are always new tools to play with.

Here are a few of my favorite marketing tech tools right now:

Segment — We use Segment as our core infrastructure for collecting analytics events and sending them off to our other tools. It’s much easier to service our marketing managers’ requests, because once we implemented Segment, we just have to click a few buttons to install new tools. We also use their software to transform and load this data into Amazon Redshift, so we can run custom queries on our campaigns. I often browse their integrations page to check out the latest martech tools. That’s how I found Keen and Periscope.

Keen.io — Keen is awesome for building custom dashboards and analyses. They don’t require you to know SQL, but you can easily drag and drop your data into super-granular charts and reports. Keen is particularly helpful for publishers who are trying to measure attribution, an ever evolving challenge.

Periscope.io — We use Periscope on top of Segment SQL to easily query our analytics data and create dashboards to display to the team. Periscope is super fast for querying because they cache your data on their servers. When you’re working with a lot of data, like we are, this speed makes a difference.

Google Analytics — While not particularly new or novel, GA gets the job done for answering most marketing questions. It’s great for understanding the traffic coming to your site, analyzing campaigns, and understanding landing page conversions.

5. Now that you’ve got the Marketing Technology team running, what is your next goal?

I’m really excited to bring data democratization to Fool.com. To me, data democratization means bringing self-service data and data tools to teams around the company. Achieving easy access to data will empower all of our employees to better understand our customers and ultimately deliver better solutions to them.

To me, data democratization means bringing self-service data and data tools to teams around the company.

When I started, 7 years ago, our employees had to go to a business intelligence analyst, request data, wait for the analyst to pick up the request, and then get their data. This worked fine, but it was too slow for us. The more we can empower our internal teams to have quicker access to data and to find their own insights in the data without always needing our BI team, the faster we can move.

Thanks, Chris and Diana!

The post Is it foolish to embed engineers in marketing? Not for Fool.com appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Mayur Gupta, author of the terrific Inspire Martech blog and the new SVP and head of digital at Healthgrades, is one of the people I admire most in this industry.

He was one of the first high-profile “chief marketing technologists” at a major brand, Kimberly Clark, where he graciously shared his experiences in numerous articles, interviews, and keynote presentations at conferences around the world — helping many others see the possibilities and the reality of that emerging new role. He’s an enthusiastic ambassador for marketing technology leadership, and he has continually served that role with an amazing combination of insight, eloquence, and humility.

He’s also been an invaluable advisor and contributor to the MarTech conference series, for which I am immensely grateful. (Quick promotional interlude: beta rates for MarTech Europe expire this Friday, and our call-for-speakers for MarTech 2016 in San Francisco is now open.)

Most of all, he’s been a great friend and an inspiration to me personally.

Since he recently made the transition from Kimberly Clark to Healthgrades, a shift from a “marketing” role to a “digital” one, I thought it would be a good time to do another Q&A with him, to learn how his perspective has continued to evolve.

1. Let’s start with an update of your career since our last Q&A back in January 2013. What have been your experiences over the past couple of years and what are you doing now?

That seems like 20 years back, with the pace at which our world is evolving and all the growth happening in the world of digital, marketing technology, and innovation.

Well, back then, I was the chief marketing technologist at Kimberly Clark within the CMO’s world, and my global organization was responsible to establish our digital footprint leveraging marketing technologies, data, and innovation.

Our biggest challenge and opportunity was to establish a connected marketing technology ecosystem that would deliver “seamless experiences in a complex omni-channel world” that would change “consumer behaviors” that we believed prevented our growth. So, more than just bringing a sleuth of enterprise and emerging marketing technologies, we focused on how we could “apply” them to address behavioral issues like “trust,” “stigma,” “trial” that would eventually maximize the life-time value for our brands.

The key to success for most brands is to shift the focus from channels and technologies to the human behavior and becoming customer obsessed, both in strategy and execution.

It was a fascinating journey for me, and my biggest takeaway has been a firm belief that, at the end of the day, it was always about the “human”, her needs, desires, and finally her behavior — and not about the technology or the channel. The key to success for most brands is to shift the focus from channels and technologies to the human behavior and becoming consumer obsessed, both in strategy and execution.

As of August 2015, I have been part of an equally fascinating organization called Healthgrades as their senior vice president, head of digital. My role, broadly, is to lead the digital transformation and establish ourselves as the largest digital center for care that delivers “seamless healthcare experiences in this complex digital and omni-channel world”.

In fact, we have gone on record to say that as an industry we cannot fall into the trap of “digital healthcare” where digital becomes a “thing,” but understand the nuances of enabling and evolving “healthcare in a digital world”.

It’s an incredible journey in a growth organization where everyone is passionate about changing lives using the power of data, technology and communication — enabling every American to find the right doctor, the right hospital, the right care at a time, location, and touchpoint of their choice.

2. Tell us about your decision to move from marketing into a “digital” leadership role. How would you characterize the similarities and differences between marketing and digital? Where are the boundaries?

That’s an interesting question because it can be answered with so many different connotations that vary from one industry to the other.

Personally, I don’t see the difference between digital and marketing. I firmly believe all marketing is digital today.

Personally, I don’t see the difference between digital and marketing. I firmly believe all marketing is digital today. Or perhaps, let’s call it something like “phygital,” where it’s no longer traditional analog marketing and digital marketing, but one — because that’s how the consumer sees it. For her it’s one experience that should get her the best product, at the best price, at a time, location ,and channel — offline or online — of her choice.

One of the things my former boss, Kimberly Clark CMO Clive Sirkin, always mentioned was in order to become a legendary brand we had to believe in “marketing in a digital world” and not digital marketing. Now, that’s the marketing perspective and the role of digital within it.

On the flip side though, there are verticals where the role of digital goes much beyond the world of marketing. For instance retail, financial institutions, travel & hospitality, and many more. Marketing is still digital, however the scope of digital is beyond marketing. For retail, it could be the digitization of the retail shopping experience. For a QSR chain, it could be the experience within the restaurant. And, of course, much more for a financial and banking institution.

That’s why the role of a chief digital officer becomes more relevant in organizations where the scope of digital is broader and central to just not marketing, but also operations, supply chain, transactions, and other functions.

At the end of the day, it’s still delivering seamless experiences that inspire participation and change behaviors.

In my context, it is a continuation from applying the power of digital technologies, data, innovation ,and storytelling to build legendary brands and change consumer behaviors to now building the largest “digital marketplace for care.” But at the end of the day, it’s still delivering seamless experiences that inspire participation and change behaviors.

3. How is marketing technology having an impact — or has the potential to have an impact — on the evolution of healthcare?

Massive would be an understatement. Being fairly new to the world of healthcare and wellness, I have been extremely surprised to see the current awareness and demand, as well as the future opportunity, that marketing technology, data, and content will bring to the evolution and positive disruption of healthcare.

Our CEO, Roger Holstein, at Healthgrades has often said “communication” is the next innovation chapter that will redefine healthcare. For me, that means getting the right content to the right person at the right time at a channel and touchpoint of their choice to inspire behavioral change and participation. Realizing this vision though requires a connected “marketing technology” ecosystem that thrives on “data” know and understand her emotional and functional needs and then syndicates the right “content” seamlessly across channels.

The role of marketing technology — which for me includes adtech as well, never saw them as isolated — in healthcare will continue to grow across media, content, data, and connectivity, including enterprise, on point, as well as innovative solutions.

A dream for a marketing technologist, as long as you are able to apply these technologies to consumer behaviors and business needs.

Whether these are marketing automation platforms, web experience management systems, social listening, and consumer engagement technologies — or more advanced cross-channel analytics and attribution models or DMPs/DSPs/SSPs and programmatic, it is all happening here. A dream for a marketing technologist, as long as you are able to apply these technologies to consumer behaviors and business needs.

4. It sounds like there are tremendous opportunities to embed “marketing” — in a very broad sense of the word — into the ongoing healthcare relationship and experience. What parallels do you see that marketers in other industries should consider?

You know, for the longest time you and I, and many others, have been discussing how every technologist needs to be a marketer, a storyteller, and so on — while every marketer should be a technologist, a data scientist.

Every technologist needs to be a marketer, a storyteller, and so on — while every marketer should be a technologist, a data scientist.

The other day, I was talking to a young oncologist at one of the premium hospitals in Chicago, and we were discussing how the modern physician will have to think like a marketer. Traditionally, they have grown up focusing on clinical results alone, but now they need to think about consumer experiences, convenience, and striving to build always-on engagement with their patients — especially during those 360 days of the year when she is not in front of them.

Now [physicians] need to think about consumer experiences, convenience, and striving to build always-on engagement with their patients.

At the end of the day, regardless of what role you play in healthcare, from the payers to the providers and the health systems, it’s all about the ability to deliver “always-on seamless care experiences in a complex digital world.” Who would have thought a few years back that the largest health systems around the world would be pushing to become legendary brands, would be hiring senior marketing executives as CMOs — not as chief medical officers, but as chief marketing officers? That’s the evolution healthcare is going through.

And I recently published the 5Cs of modern marketing with Vala Afshar on the Huffington Post, they hold even more true in healthcare:

1. CONSUMER
2. CONTEXT
3. CONTENT
4. COMMERCE
5. CONVERGENCE

5. In the digital transformation of healthcare, who are the different stakeholders designing these solutions? Are there analogies to the CMO/CIO divide that we initially faced in marketing technology? Or have different models of collaboration emerged?

That’s always an interesting aspect and partnership. It’s changing pretty quickly, to be honest. There are different players today depending what part of the ecosystem you represent.

If you are a large health system with multiple hospitals, it’s traditionally been the chief strategy, the chief finance and the chief executive officers, but they are starting to bring chief marketers (CMO) and chief digital officers (CDO) to partner with the chief information officers (CIO), who have been there all along.

One subtle difference though, from the other industries, is that the traditional scope of the CIO in healthcare is still so massive and relevant, especially in terms of back-end connectivity across the ecosystem, health records, biotech, genomics, and many other areas that there is an easier collaboration and appreciation of marketing and digital technologies being brought on by the CMO and/or the CDO.

I also feel that since healthcare is walking down that same aisle behind some of the other industries, the leaders have seen the movie being played and are starting to learn from the mistakes. There is a clear sense of getting to the same point, but in a more effective and efficient way.

6. In considering your company’s digital capabilities, how do you weigh which technology components to build as a competitive advantage and which ones to buy from the open market? What could marketing technology vendors do to better help you?

That’s a million dollar question for every organization isn’t it but if you get this right you get a lot right.

As a company, we have a very strong alignment at the senior executive level in terms of where we have the right to play and the right to win, which ultimately drives what we build, buy, or rent.

We strongly believe in our core competency being: 1. The most effective, accurate, and connected healthcare and wellness data exchange data at a consumer, provider and facility level. 2. Our ability to predict health conditions and behavior at a micro-segment and individual. And then 3. using that intelligence and predictive models to communicate the right message to the right individual at the right time, bringing to them the best doctor, the best hospital, and the best care while maximizing growth and lifetime value for health systems and hospitals.

This reality includes a number of strategic partnerships with some leading enterprise marketing technology players, as well as different start-ups and point solutions. While we apply these technologies, we continue to build and develop unique capabilities and integrations that don’t exist in the marketplace that is still highly fragmented and isolated.

7. What updated career advice would you offer to marketing technologist and aspiring marketing technologists?

Still not sure if I am worthy of giving advice, but there are three foundational lessons I have learned especially as a technologist in the second half of my career:

It has always been about the human; #HumanFirst. The ultimate goal is not technology but getting her the best product and experience.

First, it has always been about the human; #HumanFirst. The ultimate goal is not technology but getting her the best product/experience, at the best price, at the best time, and at a time and location of her choice. Nothing else matters more.

Second, driving top line growth and lifetime value for the business by selling more products to more people more often for more money — a lesson I learned from my mentor Tony Palmer, President Kimberly Clark.

Lastly, this quote from Albert Einstein that is my motto as well — “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.” Marketing technology at the convergence of art and science.

Thank you, Mayur!

The post Marketing technology? Digital? It should be #HumanFirst appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

In preparing for the upcoming MarTech Europe conference — as a promotional interjection, please note that discounted “beta rates” for tickets expire next week — I’ve had a number of terrific chats with Stephan Pretorius, the co-founder and president of Acceleration, a WPP marketing technology services firm.

Stephan will be one of our featured speakers in the closing fireside chat at our conference next month, cheekily titled: Everyone Wants To Be The CMO’s Best Friend: A Discussion Among Agencies, Systems Integrators & Management Consultants.

In advance, Stephan was kind enough to take some time to share his perspective on helping marketers tame the marketing technology beast.

1. Can you start by telling us about your background, what your career journey has looked like?

My career journey has been quite linear and one-dimensional compared to most people. I studied media law and telecoms at Columbia Law School and had some brief experience in pay-TV before setting up the first international ad network running on the DoubleClick platform in 1997 in South Africa. I started Acceleration two years later, at age 27, and have been growing it with my partners as a specialist marketing technology consultancy and systems integrator ever since.

We took very little start-up capital, so the business grew slowly in the early years, but that was probably a blessing as it gave us time to learn our craft, develop a strong culture, and implement good processes and systems. It also took time to internationalize our business from our original South African roots into the US, UK, Europe, and Middle East.

In 2012, after 13 years of organic growth, we sold a majority stake in Acceleration to WPP, who have been a fantastic parent company. On the one hand, having access to a much wider set of marketing services disciplines and some of the best marketing talent in the world has massively expanded and improved our own practice. On the other, having access to much larger and more complex global clients has challenged us to learn faster, be smarter, and compete harder.

2. Is Acceleration representative of a fundamentally new kind of agency? You’re not a digital agency, the way that’s been previously conceived, but really more of a marketing technology agency?

We don’t really position ourselves as an agency at all, despite being owned by the largest marketing services group in the world. We are fundamentally a consulting and systems integration business and compete daily with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, and Cap Gemini. We call ourselves “strategic marketing technologists” to communicate our central focus on how marketing and brand strategy intersects with technology capability.

We call ourselves “strategic marketing technologists.” Our central focus [is] on how marketing and brand strategy intersects with technology capability.

And while our focus and core skills set is around marketing and advertising technology, those boundaries are blurring daily with adjacent innovation in areas such as IoT and wearables, on the one hand, and the convergence of enterprise IT (CRM, ERP, BI) systems with marketing technology. So it’s really a very exciting and fast-moving landscape to work in.

3. What do your engagements with clients look like? Are these well-defined projects with a beginning and an end? Or is there an ongoing relationship?

Most of our engagements have a strong long-term vision that drives multiple sequential and simultaneous work streams. Those individual work streams all have very clear project plans and tend to last anything from 3 to 12 months. We do have some ongoing managed services engagements, but that is a smaller part of our overall revenue.

4. What’s the interaction like between your firm, your client’s marketing team, and your client’s IT team? Are you a referee? An alternative? A marriage counselor? Have these dynamics been evolving? If so, how?

Almost all our engagements require us to interact with both marketing and IT teams, and we are hired almost equally by both. We don’t really get in the middle of divisional fights, but if we do our jobs well both the marketers and the IT folks feel that we are advancing their causes.

Marketing organizations are often not particularly structured in how they select and manage technology, and they often create shadow IT teams.

Marketing organizations are often not particularly structured in how they select and manage technology, and they often create shadow IT teams within the marketing org to support their tools and systems. So we help them to architect and govern their technology better and to work more closely, and collaboratively, with their IT partners.

IT teams, on the other hand, are often not very experienced working with marketing and advertising technologies, mostly SaaS, and find it hard to service and support their marketing colleagues. So we do a lot of skills transfer and category immersion to bring teams up to speed.

5. How much of the marketing technology that you help marketers put in place uses off-the-shelf products? Is there any layer of customization on top of that? Are there any circumstances where you’d reccommend “build” instead of “buy”?

Everything we do uses off-the-shelf tools and platforms. Our philosophy is simple: if you’re not in the business of software development, then you have no business developing software. You will be no good at it, and even if you can develop a good-enough product in the short term, it will lose ground to well-funded and focused software companies very fast. Notable exceptions like Tesla — who built their own ERP software — are few and far between.

Our philosophy is simple: if you’re not in the business of software development, then you have no business developing software.

The core skills that companies should focus on is the correct configuration, architecture, and governance of their marketing technologies to ensure they get the maximum value from those investments. Very few companies do these things well today, partly due to the immaturity and complexity of the systems, but partly also due to the lack of experience and skills in the market.

We often recommend to clients that they select and integrate their own specific mix of tools that suits their business best instead of going all-in with a marketing cloud solution, but we see that as “architect and integrate”, not as “build”.

We often recommend that clients select and integrate their own specific mix of tools that suits their business best instead of going all-in with [a single] marketing cloud.

6. How do you work with other kinds of agencies that a brand may have in their ecosystem, such as for their advertising creative and media placement? Are those relationships more competitive, complementary, or collaborative?

We work extremely well with agencies — whether WPP or otherwise! — as we don’t compete with anything they do. We do no creative, no web or app development, no media planning or buying.

If anything, by helping the client to organize their data, systems, and processes better internally, agencies generally find it much easier to execute their ideas and get good results. They are also able to deliver a more integrated end-to-end customer experience and link their work to measurable business outcomes.

7. What about other kinds of service providers who have been engaging more with CMOs, such as the traditional IT services firms and the big management consultancies? Competitive, complementary, or collaborative?

Mostly competitive, but we often do collaborate when it comes to integrating marketing technology with enterprise IT systems like ERP, CRM, and EDW.

8. Which marketing technology capabilities do you think brands should develop in-house competencies for? Which should they look to outside service providers, either initially or on an ongoing basis?

We believe strongly that the ability to deliver a great end-to-end customer experience relies on a well-integrated and governed marketing technology ecosystem. This includes the customer data model and store, reporting and analytics, real-time decisioning, campaign delivery and optimization, and content management. So an internal competence in marketing technology strategy and architecture design is an absolute must.

An internal competence in marketing technology strategy and architecture design is an absolute must.

But it is vital to distinguish between the marketing processes, the data, and the systems. As a default we recommend that clients own their full marketing technology stack, as this provides more continuity and better architectural governance. However, external service providers usually do data enhancement and prospect data management much better than internal teams.

There is, similarly, no rule of thumb when it comes to marketing process management — it all depends on how important the function is to a business and whether it has the internal skill set. Many travel and hospitality companies, for example, manage their paid search campaigns in-house, but virtually no CPGs do the same.

As a default, we recommend that clients own their full marketing technology stack, as this provides more continuity and better architectural governance.

9. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation in the martech space these days — if we define innovation in terms of sheer number of products and features being developed. From your perspective though, how much of that innovation is being driven by real brand challenges and requirements? How can we better keep all this innovation aligned with those needs?

There is an enormous amount of positive innovation in the marketplace — better ways to manage data, gain insights, connect with customers, measure results, manage marketing operations — but very few companies are looking at the end-to-end solution for brands. Despite billions of dollars in martech innovation, most companies are drowning in IT and process complexity and most can still not consistently answer the two most basic marketing questions of “what is working?” and “what to do next?”

Despite billions of dollars in martech innovation, most companies are drowning in IT and process complexity.

In addition, there is a significant amount of bad product development and an abundance of me-too point solutions — a.k.a. “feature-as-a-platform” — in the market that create a lot of noise and confusion and make it hard for clients to build a solid long-term capability.

Ultimately, I believe the only solution is for brands to become savvier about the impact of data and technology on their marketing practice and to guide software vendors with a stronger vision for what they want developed. Today’s market is definitely more push than pull.

Thanks Stephan! I’m really looking forward to our fireside chat together at MarTech Europe next month.

The post Meet WPP’s firm of strategic marketing technologists appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.