Marketing Technology: The MarTech Landscape of Tools and Software (CXOTalk #249)

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What is marketing technology and how is it changing? Scott Brinker, co-founder, president and CTO of ion interactive, tells Michael Krigsman of CXOTalk about the changing landscape of post-click marketing and conversion optimization.

Brinker, one of the most influential voices in marketing technology, shares how greater personalization and artificial intelligence are increasingly important as marketing tech incorporates AI.

From the transcript:

Michael Krigsman:

(05:09) No, she’s really good. Okay! So, this marketing technology landscape, first off, what do you… What do you define as “marketing technology?” Is that kind of a dumb question? Or, is that a reasonable question?

Scott Brinker:

(05:25) Well, yes and no. Alright, so on one level, yeah, what is marketing technology? Well, we know that the simple definition would be the technology used for marketing. But, it turns out, actually, where things get interesting is when you ask, "Well, what do you mean by ‘marketing' and what do you mean by ‘technology'" because let's just take the marketing one for the moment. I mean, one of the things that are happening here in the marketing profession and the marketing industry is just this incredible scope explosion, right? I mean, marketing used to largely, once upon a time, be almost synonymous with advertising. You know, PR and the folks who put together the brochures, you know? And marketing still has all those responsibilities as well, too. But, right in this digital environment, we've added all these new things associated with the website, you know, mobile experiences; how does customer experience live from the very beginning of a prospects-first touch point all the way to, you know, ongoing customer success loyalty programs? You know, the whole social sphere; how does that fit into that? How are we managing social relationships? Influencers, right, to Shelly…

(06:37) I mean, […] how companies go out and manage the different people in their environment, too. They develop those relationships with the help of the social space. I mean, I can go on and on, but the scope explosion in marketing is one of the reasons there’s been an explosion of marketing technologies. So, if you look across that landscape, there are just so many different kinds of activities and opportunities that marketers have in the digital world that, yeah, the explosion of tools is simply a reaction to that to help marketers deal with all of these new touchpoints.

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(16:03) You know, a lot of these marketing and technology leadership positions do require a nontrivial amount of technical death, right? There is some actual architecture happening here, right? We have to think through things like SLAs. Even if the marketing is running the technology team under their organization, you know, this cannot be a rote group, right? It has to be interfacing with corporate IT. There were considerable issues here around just governance. So, you know, having folks who understand that is really, really important.

(16:35) I think that the one caveat I’d add to this is while I think that marketing technologists need to have some pretty good technical chops, whether they came originally from a marketing background or software background, but you know, today, they need to have somehow acquired those technical chops. I don’t think that everyone in marketing needs those kinds of technical chops. The analogy often used is like with graphic design, right? Marketing uses graphic design and there are amazing graphic designers! Hopefully, your marketing team has access to one you want to leverage.

(17:12) And so, marketing as a whole needs to understand that graphic design is an important part of what we do; we need to know who we’re going to turn to for that resource. The rest of the organization needs to be able to leverage it but not every marketer needs to be a brilliant graphic designer. It’s kind of the same thing with marketing technology. Every marketer needs to be comfortable with this technology being a part of their toolset, you know, and really focus on how do they use those tools to deliver compelling marketing. But, they don’t need to be technologists themselves.