Marketing Management

The following interview was originally published by the CMO Council in the August 2018 edition of their Marketing Magnified e-journal. They asked me eight great questions about martech for marketing executives. These are my suggestions in reply. 1. How would you characterize the state of marketing technology discovery, qualification, implementation and use in global enterprises today? In many ways, we’re living in the golden age of marketing technology. There’s a jaw-dropping amount of innovation happen …

The CMO Council asked 8 good, hard questions about marketing technology management Continue Reading »

As I’ve been preparing for the upcoming MarTech conference in Boston, I have been thinking about the fundamental forces that marketing technology and operation professionals wrangle in their work. I believe there are two overarching challenges in marketing operations today: Our environment is continuously changing, often quite rapidly. We have to gracefully balance opposing concepts and objectives. The struggle of continuous change is something that I’ve discussed previously with Martec’s Law, what I consider to …

The 4 Forces of Marketing Operations & Technology Continue Reading »

I’m going to declare that, as of August 2018, martech has crossed a threshold in maturity. And by martech, I mean the grand view of martech, the convergence of marketing, technology, and management practices across industries — and the hybrid marketing leaders who are driving the strategy and operations of that convergence. Sure, the marketing technology landscape has advanced tremendously over the past year. I think we’re finally getting our head around the paradox of …

The next level of marketing maturity on stage at MarTech this October Continue Reading »

The alliterated alternate title for this post could be: Tickets, Tools, and Taylor Swift — One Father’s Afternoon in Automated Customer Experience Purgatory. Subtitle: a small case study of anti-patterns for customer experience bots and automation. My daughter turned 10 this year. As a present, my wife and I agreed to take her to her first big pop concert, a stadium tour by Taylor Swift. (Don’t judge. Or, if you do, know that I’ll simply …

Bots and automation don’t automagically create a great customer experience Continue Reading »

Want to attend MarTech in Boston this fall, October 1-3? (If you’re a hybrid marketing technologist — or a marketing executive who depends on them — the answer should be, “Of course!”) Then this is the last week to get tickets at the lowest “alpha” rate — prices go up on Sunday, July 29. Since our first sneak peak of the MarTech agenda last month, we’ve added three exciting new keynote speakers: Michael Tidmarsh, CTO …

Last week to get MarTech tickets at the lowest rate for an awesome conference in Boston Continue Reading »

(Note: the above infographic is just a sneak peak of the partial agenda for MarTech coming up — more sessions and keynotes will be announced soon.) Man, if you’re in marketing, the world is spinning fast. Technologies such as customer data platforms (CDPs), machine learning, chatbots, microservices, and more are quickly racing through the Gartner Hype Curve, from inflated expectations to real-world impact. This has become abundantly clear to me as I’m programming the next …

MarTech, the vendor-agnostic conference for marketing technology and operations leaders, returns in October Continue Reading »

I’ve grown to dislike the label “unicorn” in martech. In the early years of the marketing technology revolution, marketing technologists — hybrid professionals who applied technical skills in a marketing context — were sometimes called unicorns. Partly because they brought seemingly magical capabilities to marketing. But mostly because finding the perfect blend of marketing and technology talent was incredibly rare. “Oh, you’re looking for a unicorn,” was HR’s way of saying, “Good luck, Don Quixote.” …

The future of marketing belongs to hybrids, but don’t call them unicorns Continue Reading »

I am fascinated by “citizen technology.” That’s a terrible name for it, because it implies digital government technology, which is not what I’m talking about. (Although that too is a fascinating topic for discussion on another day.) Rather, the labels of citizen analyst, citizen data scientist, citizen developer, citizen integrator, etc., refer to people who are not experts in a particular discipline — such as data analysis, data science, software development, systems integration, etc. — …

Democratizing martech: distributing power from IT to marketing technologists to everyone Continue Reading »

A couple of weeks ago, we hosted the MarTech West conference in San Jose. My personal thanks to all of the amazing speakers who brought such passion and insight to their martech-in-the-real-world presentations — you were awesome. Rather than offer my “hot takes” of the event a few days later, I decided to take a little more time to rest and reflect on what I personally took away from the experience. There were so many fascinating …

The myth of martech consolidation is dead. Now what? Continue Reading »

Want to speak at MarTech East in Boston, October 1-3? We invite you to propose a compelling presentation idea at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management that you’d be passionate about delivering. Sessions at MarTech East will be a mix of 45-minute in-depth presentations and panels and 20-minute TED-style talks with slides. We’re looking for session proposals that are “graduate level” in nature — not Digital Marketing 101 — where a speaker will be …

Calling marketing technology and operations leaders: come speak at MarTech East, October 1-3 Continue Reading »