Is MarTech Too Important To Leave To The Marketers?

I’m still pondering the relationship between marketing and IT: what it is, will be, and should be. A few new ingredients have kept the pot boiling:

- a chat with Abhi Yadav, founder of Zylotech, a MIT-bred, artificial intelligence-driven Customer Data Platform and message selection engine.  Those roots made it seem a likely candidate for IT-driven purchases, but Yadav told me his primary buyers are marketing operations staff.  In fact, he hasn’t even run into those marketing technology managers everyone (including me) keeps talking about. On reflection, it makes sense that marketers would be the buyers since Zylotech includes analytical and message selection features only used in marketing.  A system that only did data unification would appeal more to IT as a shared resource. Still, Yaday's comments are one point for the marketer-control team.

- a survey from the Association of National Advertisers that found marketers who control their technology strategy, vendors, and enterprise standards are more likely to have a strong return on martech investment. (The study is only available to ANA members but they gave permission to publish the table below. You can see a public infographic here).  That’s two points for Team MarTech.

- a study by IT staffing and services provider TEKsystems that found senior marketers with more advanced strategy were more likely to control their own technology.  The difference wasn’t terribly pronounced but it’s still the same pattern. MarTech is now ahead 3-0.  (I was actually more impressed that 65% of departments with no strategy were in charge. Yikes!)

So far, the game’s a blow out. Marketing is usually in charge of its technology and does better when it is.  A doubter might question if marketers really make better choices or are just happier when they’re in control. I do suspect that IT people would be less confident that marketers are making optimal decisions. Still, there’s no real reason to doubt that marketers are the best judges of what they need.

But the game’s not over. Let's call in a recent Ad Week article about global tech consultancies buying marketing agencies. The article cites Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers and notes that each already has huge agency operations.  To the extent that these firms are working with marketing departments, it’s still more evidence of marketing being in charge. But the real story, at least as I read it, is these firms are getting involved because they see a need to integrate marketing technology with over-all corporate technology, just as marketing strategy needs to support corporate strategy.

“The consultants’ bread and butter has traditionally been large IT and business-transformation projects,” says Julie Langley, a partner at fundraising, merger and acquisitions advisor Results International, in the article. “But, increasingly, these types of projects have ‘customer experience’ at their center.”

To me, this is the key. As every aspect of customer experience becomes technology-driven, technology must be integrated across the corporation to deliver a satisfactory experience. Marketing may be the captain, but it’s still part of a larger team. If marketing can be a true team player, it gets to call the plays. But if marketing is selfish, then a coach needs to step in for the good of the whole.

I’ll spare you the extended sports analogy. In concrete terms, if marketing picks systems that only meet marketing needs, then the integrated customer experience will suffer. Worse still, some new tech-driven offerings may be impossible. This could be fatal if other, nimbler competitors deliver them instead. Tech-based disruption is a real threat in many industries. Companies can’t just hope that each department working on its own will yield an optimal solution for the business as a whole.  In fact, they can be quite sure it won't.

That’s why I’m not convinced by surveys showing marketers are happier or get better return on investment when they control their own technology. It’s possible for that to be true and for the corporate to miss larger opportunities that require cooperation across departments. If marketing can take that broader perspective, there’s no problem. If it can’t, IT or another department with enterprise-wide perspective will need to enter the game.

Why Designing Your Marketing Technology Stack is a Waste of Time

My post last week about machine intelligence sparked a Twitter comment from @Jetlore, “The term 'machine learning' is like the term 'mobile' 7-10 years ago. It's simply something that all good software will do.” On reflection, this is absolutely correct – it is why there are already so many different uses of machine learning across the marketing landscape. This got me thinking about whether we could learn something from other technologies that were once bleeding edge but later became commonplace.

The most obvious of those is electricity. Nicholas Carr has explored the analogy between electric power utilities and information technology utilities in his books, but I haven’t (yet) read them. Instead I did a bit of my own research into the early twentieth century transition from steam to electric power in factories, eventually finding the key information in a paper From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspectives on Electrification by Warren D. Devine, Jr., (The Journal of Economic History, June 1983).


The story turned out to be quite interesting, at least to me. In 1898 electric motors provided less than 5% of factory power.  By 1929 they provided nearly 80%. That 30 year span means a generation of managers spent their entire careers dealing with the shift. More precisely, they dealt with many shifts: the first electric motors simply drove the same overhead shafts that had previously been powered by steam engines or water wheels (leather belts transferred power from the shafts to individual machines). Then the motors drove numerous small shafts instead of one big shaft; then separate motors were attached to individual machines; finally, the machines themselves were redesigned to take advantage of having a motor of their own. Once the machines had been optimized for electric motors and factories had been redesigned to make the best use of this new configuration, the pace of change slowed down.

The analogy with machine learning and with marketing technology in general is clear. Initial applications fit the new technology into the old process: that’s why I love this picture of a robot secretary, which was someone’s initial (presumably joking) idea of how computers could replace human secretaries.* Applications then evolve into something completely different as people uncover the best ways to use the new technology. Those changes create other changes in related systems: getting rid of the overhead power shafts let factories become bigger and more efficient because machines could be placed anywhere and the ceiling was now free for better lights. ventilation, and overhead cranes. One article quoted Henry Ford as saying that his moving assembly line would have been impossible without electrification.

The obvious lesson is that marketers should also expect continued flux as new technologies are invented and refined. But while the need to plan for such change is a commonplace among industry gurus, myself included, I haven’t seen much attention paid to the less-obvious conflict between planning for change and standard approach of defining requirements, designing an architecture to meet those requirements, and then buying components to flesh out that architecture. Just as the physical architecture of factories changed as electric motors were deployed in different and more effective ways, the architecture of marketing systems can be expected to change as the technologies mature.

This means managers need tools designed to deal with continuous change.  These include systematic ways to decide when to adopt a new technology and when to wait for further improvements, and ways to ensure that a technology you adopt doesn’t prevent you from taking advantage of future technology that is more important. Early twentieth century managers invented industrial engineering, standardized fittings, and return on investment analysis for precisely those reasons.  Todays’ marketing technology managers need similar tools but I don’t hear much discussion about how to create them.

The second less-obvious point, although I guess we can credit it to Carr, is that the reward for successfully managing these continuous changes is nothing more than survival. Like today’s marketing technology, electric motors were purchased from outside suppliers who made the same equipment available to everyone. Sound choices were essential and making the wrong choice could be fatal (literally, where electricity was involved). But being a smart, fast follower was good enough; being a pioneer or master user of the new technology didn't ultimately matter because your surviving competitors ended up with similar tools. The final success of firms depended on the quality of their products, distribution, and, yes, marketing, not in whether they used electric motors. This meant that electricians, who at one point were considered super-elite if not magical, ultimately became nothing more than valued but prosaic craftsmen. I suppose that will be the fate of marketing technologists as well: today we are river pilots navigating a wild rapids, an exhilarating task with life-or-death responsibility. But at some point we’ll reach calmer waters, and then we’ll seem, and be, less important.

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* On the other hand, conspiracy theorists: why does the robot in this picture have a reflection while the lady does not?  Perhaps she is the true alien, sent to infiltrate our planet with her diabolically irresistible technology.

Useful Tips from Inbound Marketing Summit and Hubspot User Group

I spent three days last week at the Inbound Marketing Summit and Hubspot User Group in Boston.  These featured a flock of first-rate speakers who presented more useful information than I can jam into a single blog post.  That said, here are highlights from my notes.

Youngme Moon, Harvard Business School

- when all competitors address the same customer problems, their products all seem the same
- to differentiate, embrace your negatives and make them into positives
- her examples:
  - the Mini Cooper highlighted that it was a small car, rather than trying to convince people it wasn’t really that small
  - IKEA reduces selection, service and sturdiness, and convinces people these are simplifying their choice, encouraging self-reliance, and making it easier to refresh your furnishings.  (Sorry Youngme, but I still detest IKEA.  Let's face it: the reason most people buy there is price.)

Web Content Management panel with leaders from Bridgeline, Sitecore, Percussion, and Ektron

- content management systems have evolved to deliver personalized customer experiences across all channles
- I only mention this because it supports my own view that Web content systems are candidates to encompass the marketing automation industry. 


Michael Damphousse, Green Leads

- 30% higher response rate to 3 sentence text email than HTML email
- 10x more likely to reach a lead by telephone if call within first hour of submission
- 15% higher chance of answering a call from a local phone number
- leave a voicemail that says you are sending an email and ask for a reply
- peak answering times are 7:30 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m.; these yield 20-40% more connections than calling at 10 a.m.
- people are most likely to answer their phone between 5 minutes before the hour and 10 minutes after the hour
- 23% of appointments are rescheduled; try to reschedule if someone asks to cancel

Guy Kawasaki, author, Enchantment

- keys to creating an “enchanting” product are likeability, trustworthiness, and quality
- a product must be complete, meaning it includes service and creates an entire ecosystem
- when launching something new, don’t try to convince people who reject you; instead, find people who agree with you

Dan Zarella, Hubspot

- ideas spread because they’re good at spreading, not because they’re good ideas
- social media success comes when people share your content, not when they engage with comments
- negative comments are shared less often than positive comments
- reaching influential individuals is less important than reaching large numbers of people
- people are more likely to read and share social media content on weekends
- Tweets that include “Please Retweet” are shared three times more often than those that don’t

David Skok, Matrix Partners

- viral marketing growth depends more on cycle time (how quickly people share with others) than the number of shares per person
- to attract influential followers, identify what they write about and write about it yourself
- offer rewards to both the person who shares your content and whomever they share it with, so it doesn’t seem like people are exploiting their friends

Rick Burnes, Hubspot

- be systematic about creating content that attracts the traffic you want
- check your blog analytics daily and use data to drive content decisions
- create blog posts in a mix of categories: how-to (most important, preferably daily); thought leadership, research projects, fun, controversial statements
- posts need to be useful; they don’t need to be great literature
- reuse old content
- have a big message