CONCLUSION
End of the line
WORDS : ANDREW BIRMINGHAM
It ’ s October 2019 . Congratulations , you ’ re the CMO of Beige Corp . You sell widgets . But holding on to your job secure means moving a lot of widgets through the channel and into the hands of those rapaciously greedy and disloyal customers you know and love so well by Christmas .
In the past you had so much to worry about .
You built a brand , filled the funnel , generated direct response , manually plotted all those customer journeys , drilled through the data for insights and hoped those highly paid , oddly dressed data scientists in the back room might actually work out what the customer wanted before the customer could worked it out for themselves .
Life is so much easier , now . Fire out your dashboard , type in your budget and the name of the product – and head out to lunch and let the machine do all the work . It will even get the widgets on the trucks and plot the fastest path to the customer before the customer even knows they are going to purchase .
It knows who has bought widgets in the past , when they are likely to buy them again , and in what volumes . ( It even knows when they are likely to break allowing you to sell a widget subscription service – and we know how much the markets love those predictable annuity revenues ).
It knows where to find the people who look like the people who buy widgets . It will choose the messaging , produce the creative design , book , execute , monitor and report on the advertising , write or source the content you need for social channels , ensure all parts of the supply chain are operating at maximum efficiency , and adjust to meet any changed market circumstances .
It might even conduct your performance review .
Relax . We are only kidding on that last part . But only the last part . Every thing else it can already do today . All that ’ s missing is the auto-magical integration at the very top level .
ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL
That ’ s why the picture painted above is not so far away from the world we live in today . ( And yes we tested it with some of the most senior leaders in the global martech space today though they were a little shy about acknowledging the end game given some of the implications ).
The missing link is the universal platform to tie all the threads together .
But that is coming .
Several giant deals in recent years have caught the headlines such as Salesforce buying Exact Target or Oracle buying Responses . But beneath it all there are literally dozens of smaller deals happening on a monthly basis as the marketing tech sectors consolidates around a simple idea .
Marketing tech giants such Adobe , Oracle , Salesforce and Market have a very clear sense of where the future is leading us and the increasing interest all of these companies have in the wider ecosystem that also incorporates the worlds of ad tech and analytics is clear evidence of their intent .
Over the last 12 months ADMA , B & T and Which-50 have dived deeply into the world of marketing technology as we have pulled together Australia ’ s most comprehensive guide – the ADMA Arms Traders Almanac .
During that time the trends we have investigated have only become more pronounced .
Marketers will become more reliant on the machine and machine learning , on data and the insights it offers and on algorithms to drive business outcomes .
WINNERS
It all starts with the customer .
For all the advances in marketing and ad tech in recent years , the reality is that it is the consumer who is the real winner .
Ask any retailer . Digital technologies provide customers with extraordinary capacity for research , comparison and analysis . Their voices are amplified through social channels and time and again they have shown they are not afraid to shout .
And the economic benefits of digital transformation largely accrue to the consumer .
According to research by McKinsey and Company as much as 90 % of the benefit of disruption ends up in the pockets of customers in the form of avoided cost .
That disruption is set to continue . More than a billion digital natives will join the global economy in the next seven years and they will enter a world where their basic expectations of service and personalisation will exceed anything marketers from even a decade ago could imagine .
Brands also benefit significantly from the change . They are better informed about their customers than ever before , and if they are willing to make the investment in platform , infrastructure and capability much of the friction that fed into purchasing inertia can be eliminated .
Marketing tech and ad tech provide extraordinary transparency around campaign
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