The Martech Show is back! Our latest episode is an interview with Benedict Evans, tech and media analyst extraordinaire, talking about his latest presentation, The Great Unbundling, and what it means for marketers and martech.

Here’s a transcribed excerpt from Benedict explaining how the “The Great Unbundling” breaks the traditional silos of the different budgets connected to customer relationships:

How does somebody get the thing? Is it a shop? Is it delivered? Do you collect it? And B how do you know that it exists? And all of those used to be encapsulated in this fairly straightforward value chain, which was, if you were in CPG, like you, you made the thing, you had an ad budget, you ran magazine ads and TV shows, and you sent trucks of the staff to stores and you maybe gave the store some money to market it as well.

And you gave them a 50% margin and the customer would see the ad or see the product in the store and they’d go to the store and they buy it. And this was like, this is how it’s been for a hundred years or so. 150 years.

And now, 25% of L’Oreal’s sales are online. Not their own channel, but online. And 15% of Nike’s sales at nike.com. Amazon is probably eight to 10% of US retail, but 40% of e-commerce. And do you get that by parcel or do you get that delivered? Or you go to the store? Or does it come to you with somebody on a bike?

You’ve got logistics on one side and discovery on the other side and in the middle, you have all these budgets.

So you have a rent budget. In the US, I have a, like a wild, very approximate guess that retail rent is say $250 billion. Then we know there’s an advertising number. There’s a marketing number. There’s a delivery number. There’s also of course their returns number. And in the past, those were like all separate budgets in different bits of the P&L.

And now you might ask yourself, okay, do we open more stores or do faster delivery or free returns?

So is that the rent budget and their returns? Of course, on the P&L their returns are in their gross revenue above the top of the P&L. But if you were to open more stores, which would be like halfway down the P&L, then your gross revenue might shift. How does the CFO think about it versus what’s actually going on in the levers that you put your business?

These used to be all separate things. And now they’re all one big sort of fuzzy question of, what does our relationship with our customer look like?

Watch the full episode here.

The post The Martech Show Episode #11: The Great Unbundling with Benedict Evans appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Season #1 of The Martech Show concludes in Episode #10 with a terrific conversation with David Edelman, truly one of the the pioneers of modern, martech-powered marketing.

David led the strategy and analysis practice of Digitas for the first wave of martech in the 2000’s, and then was a partner at McKinsey for the second wave of martech in the 2010’s. He joined as the CMO of Aetna in 2016, digitally transforming the organization through its acquisition by CVS. He now serves as an executive advisor to several cutting-edge martech vendors.

David is one of the rare individuals in our industry who has led digital transformation from the perspective of an agency, a management consultant, a CMO, and now martech vendor strategy and go-to-market.

Common threads throughout David’s career have included a passion for agile marketing practices in large organization and implementing successful personalization programs at scale.

We’re joined by Jim Dicso, CEO of SundaySky, a remarkable video personalization platform, which sponsored this episode by making a meaningful donation to the Food Bank for New York City on our behalf. (Thank you!)

David was a customer of SundaySky at Aetna and now serves as an advisor to them, so we were able to dig into some great examples of how all the pieces of a bold idea, data, experimentation, and personalization all came together at Fortune 50 company.

You can watch the full episode here:

The post The Martech Show Episode #10: Lessons from a Fortune 50 CMO on Agile Marketing, Martech & More appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

For this 9th episode of The Martech Show, I was delighted to have Rishi Dave, CMO of MongoDB, join me for a conversation about his experience as a tech-savvy CMO. Prior to MongoDB, Rishi had served as the CMO of Vonage and Dun & Bradstreet. Before that, he led digital marketing for the enterprise group at Dell.

Rishi, whose educational background was chemical engineering, has been one of the pioneers of martech-age marketing. For this episode, we ditched the slides and just discussed Rishi’s experience in the evolution of the marketing profession:

• Rishi’s transition to CMO — what was this like? Any surprises?
• Agile marketing practices, modern team organization
• Managing martech and marketing operations — experiences, insights, practices
• Thoughts on build vs. buy marketing tech? APIs in marketing?
• Getting broader adoption of marketing technology across the org
• How to communicate the value of martech and marketing ops to the C-suite?
• Relationship between marketing and IT — how has he seen that evolve?
• Any new marketing technologies you’ve been impressed with lately?
• 2020 “remote work” experience with marketing team
• Advice for the next generation of aspiring CMOs

Watch the full episode here:

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Ben Bloom, a senior research director at Gartner who specializes in marketing technology management, joined me for Episode #8 of The Martech Show to share some surprising data from their latest report, Marketing Technology Survey 2020.

The first surprise? A pretty significant shift in the preference for integrated suites over best-of-breed solutions. Like a 30 point shift from 29% in 2019 to 59% in 2020.

After years of trending away from suites to best-of-breed, The Suite Strikes Back..?

Yes — but it’s different this time. The first generation of marketing suites were generally closed solutions, without open APIs or ecosystems of third-party apps. They promised to include everything a marketer could ever want in one box. But as the martech landscape expanded exponentially, the dream that one company could build it all slipped out of reach.

Today’s “suite” is not about marketing. Or, more accurately, it isn’t just about marketing. It’s about providing the backbone for marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s less about trying to do all the things anyone could ever want in each of those functions, but rather to be the common foundation that connects all of them together.

These are open platforms with ecosystems, not closed suites behind barricades.

The huge jump in “suite” preference, Ben believes — and I agree — is being driven by the recognition that customer journeys need to be orchestrated across marketing, sales, and customer service. Enterprises are buying those three “modules” in the suite to get their teams aligned and customer experiences better coordinated across their organization.

However, they’re still using a variety of specialist apps within their martech stacks (and sales stacks and customer success stacks). But those specialist apps are now typically integrated with the primary platform/suite.

Anyway, this was just the first 10 minutes of my discussion with Ben, which went on to discuss one other major surprise too. But I’ll leave you to discover that in the full episode:

The post The Martech Show Episode #8: The Martech Suite Strikes Back? appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

You think there’s a lot of martech, right?

But it’s only a fraction of the total SaaS universe out there. This latest episode of The Martech Show features Jay McBain, Forrester analyst extraordinaire — I’ve long been a fan of his work — sharing his insights about SaaS markets and ecosystems.

Jay estimates that there are ~175,000 SaaS companies in the world today — and predicts that there could be 1 million by 2027. As we joked, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

His prediction isn’t a random large number. In this episode, Jay walks us through the math and rationale behind it:

• 12 lines of business
• 297 subindustries
• 197 countries
• 14 sectors, sizes & segments
• 26 technology categories

…crunching the numbers, Jay calculates 35 million market opportunities. Yes, there will be plenty of overlap. But every niche will have specialists vying to tailor solutions to them, even if they’re only extensions built on top of larger, horizontal platforms.

This naturally leads into a discussion about ecosystems, which is the SaaS category that Jay specializes in — all the different kinds of software for partner and channel management. (The lovely landscape at the top of this post is his masterpiece.) He shared a ton of great insights on how that space is evolving.

This episode of The Martech Show was sponsored by Treasure Data — who generously donated to Second Harvest (part of Feeding America) on our behalf. Their CMO Tom Treanor joined Jay and me for our discussion, and it was a perfect fit: Tom brought a lot of relevant perspective from the CDP deployments they’ve seen.

Here’s the full episode for your viewing pleasure:

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For the fifth episode of The Martech Show, we talked about five major trends of marketing technology. For this sixth episode, we discussed the six disciplines of agile marketing. For the seventh episode, we’ll clearly need to cover seven swans-a-swimming, which would make a great viral TikTok video.

Coincidence or martech numerology? You decide.

Seriously though, this episode was one of my favorite. Jim Ewel, one of the pioneers of agile marketing, just released a terrific book, The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing, and he gave us an excellent overview of those disciplines and four shifts in management and culture that make agile methods really deliver.

We also took a brief trip down memory lane to a post I wrote over 10 years ago, sketching out early ideas for an agile manifesto. It’s pretty wild to think back to those younger days when the reconfigured blend of marketing, technology, and management was so nascent.

This past decade has taught us so much. Jim’s distilled so many of those learnings based on years of running agile teams and coaching and training others.

Here’s the full episode:

I highly recommend picking up a copy of Jim’s book.

Jim gave me the great honor of writing the foreword, which I’ll share with you here as a further temptation for what’s inside…

Foreword to The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

It has never been a better time to be a marketer.

The explosion of technology over the past 20 years has opened a myriad of new ways for us to attract, engage, and delight customers. Thousands of martech software companies now vie with each other to empower us in ever more innovative ways. Social networks and search engines give us near unlimited reach.

The digital world has become an unbounded canvas for us to create and communicate, drawing upon a palette of infinite shades and hues with an artists toolbox of every imaginable brush, knife, sponge.

And this power to create has never been in greater demand.

Marketing, which used to be a peripheral function at many companies — the “arts and crafts department” as one marketer once lamented to me — has gravitated to the very center of the organization.

Marketing has become the heartbeat of customer experience, delivering customer engagement to the far reaches of the organization and bringing rich insights back to the management brain.

Those who master the art and science and engineering of modern marketing can have the world at their feet.

And yet.

And yet many organizations struggle to harness this awesome creative power that is tauntingly just beyond their grasp.

It’s not because they can’t afford it. Many of the best tools in marketing today are relatively inexpensive, especially just to give them a try — the ubiquitous “freemium” model of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Nearly everything in the cloud scales on demand, so you can pay relative to the growth you achieve.

It’s not because they don’t have the skills — at least not the skills to wield the tools or execute digital tactics. Most of digital marketing isn’t rocket science. Martech tools are competing mightily with each other on user experience (UX), striving to make their products easier and friendlier for new users to adopt and apply.

And almost any question you have about how to do something can be answered instantaneously with a search on Google, which you can do from your glowing mobile phone in the middle of the night.

When you stop to think about it, we really do live in the age of miracles and wonders.

So where is the struggle? What stands between most marketing departments and digital paradise?

Management.

Of course, right? Who else takes the rap when something doesn’t work?

But the problem here isn’t the people in management. The problem is the process. Too many organizations still manage marketing with the practices and procedures of the previous century. It’s like yoking six horses to a jet airplane, so you can roll across the plains in a shiny, metal stagecoach.

To soar, we need a new approach to running marketing.

That approach, in a word, is “agile.”

The discipline of agile management has evolved over the past two decades, from a manifesto in software development circles to a rich set of methodologies that are now harnessed in nearly every discipline in our digital world. When applied in marketing, we call it “agile marketing.”

Agile marketing is the secret to splitting the digital atom and unleashing its full power.

Agile marketing enables your teams to move faster and more efficiently. They’ll adapt to changes better, with less friction and fuss. They’ll experiment in a focused and disciplined manner to discover new opportunities. They’ll continually improve — not just the work that they deliver, but the way they work together.

They’ll love their work more. Really.

In study after study, teams who have embraced agile marketing report that they enjoy their jobs more. Happy, empowered teams produce better results.

Unlike splitting the real atom, splitting the digital atom with agile marketing doesn’t take a PhD in particle physics. The principles of agile marketing are actually quite intuitive in the age of digital work, and its methods are mechanically quite easy to execute.

But implementing agile marketing successfully — not just speaking the words or going through the motions of stand-ups and Kanban boards — requires an understanding of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a hill to climb not because it’s inherently difficult, but because it’s different than how you’ve managed before.

But in your hands (or on your screen) is the guide you need to make that climb.

Jim Ewel is one of the pioneers of agile marketing, who helped forge the discipline over the past decade. He brings a wealth of experience as a marketing executive, a CEO, a university instructor in digital marketing, and an agile workshop leader for top brands. He has thought very deeply about the “how” and the “why” of agile marketing and has distilled his wisdom eloquently into this book.

The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing is modern classic of marketing management.

Read this. Embrace it. Practice it. Iterate and adapt it.

On the other side, you’ll agree: there’s never been a better time to be a marketer.

The post The Martech Show Episode #6: The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Earlier this month, my opening keynote for the (virtual) MarTech Conference covered five major trends in marketing technology that are already present today but will grow dramatically over the next 10 years in The Age of the Augmented Marketer:

1. “No Code” Citizen Creators
2. Platforms, Networks & Marketplaces
3. The Great App Explosion
4. From Big Data to Big Ops
5. Harmonizing Human + Machine

The research for that keynote came out of a collaboration I did with Jason Baldwin, the head of product management at WPP. We’ve got a full report coming out soon, but in advance of that release, Jason joined me for The Martech Show Episode #5 to share his insights on several of those trends, particularly “Harmonizing Human + Machine” and the near future of AI in marketing.

We were joined by Alex Pelletier, founder and CEO of martech consultancy Perkuto, who graciously sponsored this episode by making a donation on behalf of the show to One Laptop Per Child. Alex brought some great perspective to the trend of The Great App Explosion talking about his firm’s experience in blending software and services.

We had some great questions from the live studio audience too. Here’s the full episode for your viewing pleasure:

This coming Friday, October 23, we’ll be recording Episode #6 with special guest Jim Ewel discussing his new book, The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing. Jim is one of the pioneers of the agile marketing movement and brings a wealth of perspective on the subject. Join us live at 11am ET that day if you want to take advantage of the time to ask Jim your own questions about agile marketing.

The post The Martech Show Episode #5: Martech Trends in Agency Land appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Okay, the original title for this episode was, “Marketing Has a Data Farm: AI, AI, Oh!” — the kind of whimsical play on words that amuses me to no end. (I know, my bar for self-amusement is pretty low.) We intended to discuss how marketing is harnessing its troves of data through real-world examples of AI and machine learning models.

However, with Christopher Penn, co-founder and chief data scientist of Trust Insights as our editorial guest — and a true expert on the subject of AI and machine learning in marketing — I let the conversation drift to topics that Christopher felt particularly passionate about:

1. How to detect BS in AI sales pitches from martech vendors.
2. The many ways in which bias can slip into machine learning — and the terrible consequences that can happen when it does.

These are both important issues, and Christopher did an excellent job explaining different kinds of AI/ML bias and how they can creep in. One of the examples he shared was particularly eye-opening. Don’t let your brand accidentally end up featured in a presentation that way.

Christopher also shared solid advice for marketers concerned about losing their jobs to AI.

Cuspera sponsored this episode by making a donation to World Central Kitchen on behalf of the show. (Thank you!) Founder and CEO Subbu Vempati joined us for the second half of the discussion.

Here’s the full show:

This Friday, we’ll be recording The Martech Show Episode #5 — 5 Martech Trends for the Decade Ahead: The Agency View featuring Jason Baldwin, head of product management at WPP. Jason and I have been collaborating on a “Martech 2030” project, part of which was shared in my opening keynote at the MarTech Conference this past week. We’ll dig into what these trends mean for the future of marketing agencies.

Come join us in the live (virtual) studio audience and ask Jason and myself questions on this topic. It will be a lively discussion, I’m sure.

The post The Martech Show Episode #4: Avoiding Bias and BS in AI and Machine Learning appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The latest episode of The Martech Show is now available for your viewing pleasure.

It was a terrific session, with special guest Erica Seidel, executive recruiter and founder of The Connective Good, along with our sponsoring guest Justin Sharaf, VP marketing at Jahia.

Erica kicked off the show by walking us through the evolving trends she’s been seeing in hiring marketing executives — see the table at the top of this post — as well as some of the trade-offs that companies need to consider when hiring the right CMO.

We then shifted into a discussion about how marketing ops and martech professionals can advance to leading the entire marketing organization. More CMOs are coming from these backgrounds. But while ops and tech pros have some advantages to press, they also face challenges — both real and perceived — in winning these top spots.

Erica shared some terrific advice on overcoming these hurdles, and Justin shared his personal experience on the journey from leading marketing ops and technology at LogMeIn to running of all marketing at Jahia.

As the show’s sponsor, Jahia made a donation on our behalf to Rosie’s Place, a non-profit that provides shelter and support services for poor and homeless women in the Boston area.

Watch the full episode here:

Our next episode will be “Marketing Has a Data Farm: AI, AI, Oh!” with martech superstar Christopher Penn of Trust Insights. He’ll be walking us through real-world examples of AI in marketing today — and debating where the future of AI will take us.

Join us in the live (virtual) studio audience on Friday, October 2, at 11am ET.

The post The Martech Show Episode #3: The Road from Marketing Ops to Marketing Tops (CMO) appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The second episode of The Martech Show is now posted for your viewing pleasure. It was a great honor to have David Raab, founder of The CDP Institute — indeed, the person who defined the customer data platform category — as my guest.

David had just completed the analysis of the latest CDP Institute Member Survey, and he brought along a collection of interesting findings related not only to CDPs but martech architecture and management in general.

One slide that we spent a fair amount of time discussing was this analysis of the obstacles to CDP success — and how they shifted depending on the stage that a company was at in their adoption of a CDP:

David also brought along puppets. And his own puppeteer. The busy bees. The lunatic cow who was udderly upset about the printer not working. A robot appearing over his shoulder that he never quite acknowledged.

I know it’s only our second episode, but this was the most surreal one to date.

Without further ado, here’s Episode #2: Attack of the CDP Clones Insights from the CDP Whisperer…

Join us for the live (virtual) studio recording of The Martech Show Episode #3: From Marketing Ops to Marketing Tops, with special guest Erica Seidel of The Connective Good, a pioneering executive recruiter in the martech industry, on September 18 at 11am Eastern. We’ll be discussing the career paths from martech and marketing operations to the CMO’s chair.

Attend for free here:

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