AMA Madison’s 2021 Virtual Annual Conference: Power of Community on Sept. 30, will be packed with relevant topics to help you deal with today’s challenges.
As challenging as the past eighteen months have been for marketers, we learned that people and organizations can adapt quickly when we must. Many companies implemented new ways of engaging with their customers through digital channels and new ways of operating internally with a remote workforce in a matter of weeks last spring. Previously, such significant changes would have been estimated to take years. The impact to marketers and the communities they serve was huge!
Last year taught us how disruption can come at us quickly, and not just from the usual suspects like start-ups or adjacent competitors. Disruption can happen instantaneously. The global pandemic shut down critical elements of marketing and sales, such as retail channels and in-person events, in a matter of days. While we hopefully won’t repeat 2020’s challenges anytime soon, we can expect more and different kinds of disruptions ahead.
It can feel overwhelming to marketing professionals who must keep up with emerging martech trends. In his presentation, “5 Martech Trends You Need to Know Today to Get Ahead in the Next Decade,” Scott Brinker will cover five major marketing technology trends poised to shape marketing strategy and operations at agencies and brands over the next 10 years. Instead of predicting the course of individual technologies — such as 5G or virtual reality interfaces — we’ll delve into second-order effects on marketing strategy and operations derived from them. Each of these trends is already emerging in practice today. But we believe each of them will grow exponentially in the years ahead. Collectively, they will reshape marketing disciplines in profound and wondrous ways, with huge impacts on the communities we serve.
Attendees will learn:
- Five key marketing technology trends that will shape marketing strategy and operations at agencies and brands.
- Learn how the incredibly diverse spectrum of “no code” tools make any marketer a “maker”
- Understand how platform patterns are shaping marketing technology software
- Prepare for the shift from “big data” to “big ops”
We sat down with Scott for a Q&A to see what we can expect from his workshop presentation:
How are you feeling about marketing today?
It’s a super exciting time in marketing. I’ve been following this space here, working in it for well over a decade. And for all the amazing things that were happening in the last decade, I thought, “Oh my goodness, what a revolution in marketing and MarTech!” Now we’re coming out of the crazy catalyst that was the past year and a half, but also just as technology and the cloud is continuing to advance in really fascinating ways… I kind of realized that actually, wow, our past 10 years have been exciting. But this next 10 years, in many ways, is going to be even more exciting. Not to fear, this is something we’re all going through together. We’re all going to figure it out. I’ll try to give folks a little bit of snippets of what they can take advantage of now, what’s on the horizon in the immediate future.
What do you expect the audience to take away from your presentation?
I’ll touch on five topics. The first is this whole movement around what I call “Citizen Creators,” you know, which if you’ve been hearing the terms about different no-code platforms, or if you started to take advantage of design tools like Canva or podcasts… basically more technology is allowing us general marketers to have at our fingertips the ability to create things that previously we needed either expert developers or expert designers or expert audio engineers to do. So a lot of great power being unlocked there.
The second thing is to talk a little bit about the dynamics of things like platforms and networks, not only because they impact the technologies or the go-to-market plays that we’re running, but increasingly there’s some of those patterns that we are starting to adopt for how we run marketing as a department.
Then we’ll shift into a discussion about what I call the great app explosion, which isn’t just my crazy MarTech landscape – all these different 8,000-10,000 MarTech apps out there. But more broadly, we’re just entering an age where the amount of software available in the cloud, for all practical purposes, is infinite. And so rather than waiting for the miraculous consolidation that puts it all into one ring to rule them all, let’s talk about how we harness the energy of this diversity in the app universe and actually make sense of it for our own marketing strategies.
Then we’ll talk a little bit about this evolution from the world of big data. We spent like a decade figuring out how do we get our arms around all this readable data that’s flowing into our organization. But we’re now ready to move from a world of big data to what I call “big ops,” which is not just about that data, but now how do we operationalize on that and how more and more teams are, not just in marketing, but throughout the organization, able to collaboratively and in parallel leverage this stuff to actually shape customer experience in a much more continuous fashion.
Then we will close out with everybody’s favorite topic in technology marketing, which is to look at harmonizing human and machine. The advances that we’re seeing in AI are really incredible. But it’s not about AI versus humans. It is particularly in marketing about this collaboration of how do we leverage AI in the way that that draws on its strengths and also allows us as human marketers to bring our greatest strengths to that combination. So it will be an action-packed discussion in a relatively short window, but I’m looking forward to it.
Do you see big changes coming ahead for smaller marketers with AI as well?
Certainly, a lot of AI technology is actually being built into the products that marketers are adopting. In fact, in some cases, the best AI is AI that you as a marketer don’t even really consciously think about. It’s just sort of embedded in the tools you’re using to make your day-to-day processes faster and more effective. But there’s also interesting things like some of these larger AI custom models and all sorts of stuff that you see in enterprises. There’s so much innovation happening in the space, those no-code tools that start to make even smaller versions of that capability accessible to even relatively small marketing teams without a whole team of data scientists in a back room.
Don’t miss Scott and the opportunity for connection to your fellow Madison marketers at AMA Madison’s 2021 Virtual Annual Conference: Power of Community. Register Now!
About Scott Brinker
Scott serves as the Vice President of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, helping the company create more synergy with the rest of the marketing technology landscape. He is also the editor of The Chief Marketing Technologist blog at chiefmartec.com. Scott co-founded and served as CTO of Ion Interactive, a software company that provides marketers with a platform for creating and testing interactive content, such as quizzes, assessments, solution finders, calculators, and more. Scott may be best known for annually releasing the Marketing Technology Landscape. He’s been a leader at the intersection of marketing and technology for some time, previously running a successful web development agency, which among other things built most of the web marketing infrastructure for Citrix. And before that ran a web technology consultancy that built early web apps for CBS Sportsline, Tribune, the Miami Dolphins, and Fujitsu. Scott graduated from Columbia University with a B.S. in computer science, and holds an MBA from MIT and a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard University.