MarTech Europe is less than 7 weeks away, and I think this may be the best one yet.
A mere 45 days from now, we’re going to be hosting the opening reception on Monday evening, 19 October at the groovy Millenium Gloucester Hotel in London. And then all day Tuesday and Wednesday, 20-21 October, will be jam-packed with 24 sessions from some of the best and brightest practitioners and thought leaders at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management.
If you’re working in that inspiring intersection, this conference was designed for you.
We’ve put the final touches on the program agenda, which you can peruse on the graphic above (click on the image for a larger, readable version). Since our original post, we’ve added speakers from Facebook, IBM, Accenture, Xaxis, Auto Trader, Trend Micro, and BMI – British Midland. I’m humbled by all the amazing people who will be taking the stage.
Here’s just a taste of what you can expect:
Chief Marketing Technologists to Illuminate IT/Marketing Collaboration. Andreas Starke, the chief marketing technologist at SAP, will share his experience in helping to transform SAP’s own marketing department, including the architecture and implementation of a single marketing platform for real-time customer insights. Thomas Burklé, chief marketing technologist at the Hager Group, will describe the exciting collaborations between marketing and IT at his company to pioneer new “smart home” opportunities — and discuss the “Uber-isation” of business that every business (not just Uber) should be considering. Martin Majlund, group marketing technologist at Carlsberg Group, will share his story of how marketing and IT began working together to create a global foundation for scalable digital innovations.
Insights on Technology-Powered Digital Marketing Leadership. James Moore, senior director of marketing at eBay, will discuss the company’s journey to building out an omni-channel marketing capability on a global scale, including changes in structure, process, technology, culture, and leadership required to make it happen. Cristian Citu, director of global digital marketing at DHL, will provide insights on how the world’s largest logistics group approaches digital marketing KPIs, the practises for working with and managing digital partners, and the hunt for new digital revenue streams.
Marketing Technologists on How to Grow Marketing Operations. Gijs van Kersen, senior manager marketing operations at Juniper Networks, will describe how his company resolved challenges of organisational processes and staff training to effectively harness marketing automation and tracking platforms. Diederik Martens, global marketing automation manager at Quintiq/3DS, will reveal which technologies, tools, processes, insights, and best practises worked — and which didn’t — in growing a marketing operations department from square one. And Gary Verster, senior marketing operations manager at Trend Micro, will talk about “life on the ground” of how a technologist really fits into the marketing team, especially when it’s emerging as a new role.
Strategies for Broader Digital Transformation. Since marketing technology is often a catalyst for larger digital transformation of a business, I’m very excited to have two of the thought leaders I admire most on this subject joining us. Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Econsultancy, will give a talk on innovative, “blank sheet of paper” organisational designs that enable true digital transformation and customer-centricity — and share examples of pioneering companies who are already implementing them. Neil Perkin, director of the consultancy Only Dead Fish, will explore the steps existing companies must take to become genuinely “digitally native” in their organisational design, innovation, talent, culture, and strategy. I’ll also note that both of these two gentlemen have been leading advocates of agile marketing for many years.
How to Select and Implement the Right Marketing Technology for Your Firm. Theresa Regli, managing director of Real Story Group, will address the hundreds of available choices in the marketing technology landscape that can feel very overwhelming and answer the question: how should you go about selecting the right mix of tools to fulfill your digital marketing vision? Matt Lerner, the London distro partner for 500 Startups, will reveal how their business accelerator built an in-house “Distro Hacking” team that has worked (in the code) with hundreds of start-ups, helping them build and scale their marketing platforms. He’ll tell you which tools they use and how to complete projects that get results, quickly, and on a budget. And Cleve Gibbon, chief marketing technology officer at Cognifide, will share lessons learned from delivering customer experience management platforms for major brands in buying and building new systems and bridging between (or burning!)existing marketing technologies
Changing Your Marketing Technology Capabilities. In a closely related topic, Colin Lewis, marketing director of bmi — British Midland regional airline, will describe their decision to completely replace their reservations system and e-commerce system — completed in 4 months from a standing start to a full-scale launch. Colin will share the story of the choices, the compromises, the debates and the discussion, the partners and the platforms and the cutover and the craziness to get a business-changing technology platform live. Anyone who is facing a significant “rip-and-replace” effort with a major marketing technology system will benefit from Colin’s experience and advice.
Analysis of the Latest Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing Technologies. Ian Cleary, the CEO of RazorSocial and the world’s foremost authority on social media tools, will discuss the significant changes underway in that space and how businesses can leverage these latest technologies for measurable results from social media. Dr. Dave Chaffey, the CEO of Smart Insights, will show how marketing technologies for content planning, management, personalization, and workflow can integrate content creation, publication and distribution — and how the latest measurement tools for content marketing can better evaluate ROI.
Successful Agency/Client Collaboration in Marketing Technology. Ian Mahoney, the head of delivery services at Marks & Spencer, and Pinak Vedalankar, director of technology at SapientNitro, will share the incredible story of how Marks & Spencer launched an entirely new in-house commerce platform — a beautiful, integrated, branded content and commerce engine conceived and engineered for M&S’s technology-empowered consumer, providing an omni-channel experience across web, tablet, mobile, customer service, in-store kiosks and digital signage. Daniel Kirby, CEO of Techdept, Rick Grundy, CTO of Techdept, and Arthur Tindsley, creative technologist at Microsoft Advertising, will describe the collaborative software project they built for retailer John Lewis for Christmas 2014, where children could take their toys into the flagship store and bring them to life as interactive animations.
Marketing Technology and the Internet of Things. This is one of the hottest topics for the year ahead in marketing. In addition to Thomas Burklé’s presentation on the Uber-isation of business models, Andy Hobsbawm, the CMO of EVRYTHNG, will explain how businesses adopting IoT technology are digitizing physical assets and turning products into dynamic, web-connected, intelligent objects that play an active, functional role in how they are made, sold and used. He’ll show how marketers have can manage real-time smart product data to get closer to their customers, make their supply chains smarter and create systems that will transform both customer experiences and underlying business models.
Understanding the Collision of Adtech and Martech. Rebecca Muir, head of research and analytics at ExchangeWire, will moderate an all-star panel on the real impact of marketing technology and advertising technology coming together. Participants will include: Zuzanna Gierlinska, director of data management platforms at Oracle, Caspar Schilickum, CEO of Xaxis EMEA, Steve Webb, region director of Atlas EMEA for Facebook, and Rakesh Patel, commercial director of digital at Auto Trader UK. The panel will discuss: how is the vendor landscape changing? How does it affect relationships between agencies and brands? What are the new capabilities marketers are getting from closer integration of these technologies? What challenges — technical, operational, cultural, regulatory — must be overcome?
The Human Side of Marketing Analytics. Colin Strong, managing director of Verve and author of Humanizing Big Data, believes that deriving the full value of martech won’t happen if the human aspects of analysis are ignored. Big data and machine learning are of little value if people are excluded from the equation. But what are these aspects and how do we manage them? Colin will present a new agenda for human analytics that leverages the benefits of human judgement whilst mitigating the imperfection of human reasoning.
The State of the Major Marketing Clouds and the Road Ahead. I’ll moderate a candid fireside chat with John Watton, EMEA marketing director of Adobe, Sylvia Jensen, director of EMEA marketing at Oracle, Jeremy Waite, head of digital strategy EMEA at Salesforce, and Elizabeth Smyth, area VP of marketing at Marketo. In this open conversation, we’ll discuss the trends that they’re seeing in the field, differences and similarities in how they view the evolution of their products, the ecosystems of other technologies being shaped around their platforms, and patterns of adoption and transformation they’re seeing among their customers.
The Intertwining of Agencies, Systems Integrators, and Management Consultants. Agencies. Marketing service providers. Systems integrators. Management consultants. Marketing technology vendors with professional services offerings. They all want to be the best friend of the CMO these days. I’ll also moderate a fireside chat with representatives from each, including Jason Heller, global lead of digital marketing operations at McKinsey & Company, Stephan Pretorius, president of WPP marketing tech agency Acceleration, Anatoly Roytman, managing director EALA at Accenture Interactive, and Amanda Gosling, global partner at IBM Interactive Experience, to answer the question of who does what? Whilst each of these players has a different set of strengths, they increasingly overlap in the services they provide — and compete for influence with the same set of senior decision-makers. We’ll compare and contrast different views of how they fit together.
Adapting Technology Management Concepts for Marketing Management. Finally, in my own presentation, HACKING MARKETING, I will cover how successful management frameworks from the software industry can be adapted to the practice of marketing, including: agile and lean management methodologies, structured innovation techniques, pragmatic approaches for scaling up in a fragmented and constantly shifting environment, and strategies to unleash the full potential of talent in a digital age.
Whew!
MarTech Europe is a single track event, so everyone who attends will be able to hear all of these great speakers on all of the topics above. I promise it will be a massive mental infusion of marketing technology wisdom.
But the speakers, as wonderful as they are, are just a part of the equation. One of the primary benefits of attending MarTech Europe is the opportunity to meet and mingle with your peers, hundreds of other senior and mid-level executives who are innovating their businsses at the intersection of marketing and technology, from countries all over Europe and beyond.
If you want to join us — and if the above topics light up your eyes — the Beta Rate for tickets expires Friday, 18 September. If you sign up before then, you will save 18% on an all-access pass to the conference. Register here.
I hope to see you there next month!
