Reimagine Marketing: A podcast from SAS

[MUSIC PLAYING] WILSON RAJ: Marketing technology, or MarTech has suddenly become both more important and more problematic. Marketers must consider how to tame the profusion of technology and harness it to work more effectively, both for the customer and the brand.

Hi. I'm Wilson Raj, and welcome to this episode of Reimagine Marketing podcast, The Perils and Promises of MarTech. And today I'm so excited to welcome a special guest, Scott Brinker. He is well known as the editor of the chiefmartec.com blog. He's also the VP of platform eco-systems at HubSpot. Welcome, Scott.

SCOTT BRINKER: Hi, Wilson. It's great to be here with you.

WILSON RAJ: Absolutely.

SCOTT BRINKER: The perils and promise of marketing. I love it.

WILSON RAJ: Yeah, I know. I thought you would like that, that alliteration, but also I think sort of the dual-edged nature of the topic that-- Now, Scott, frankly, you had been on this for a long time. I think, if I remember correctly, I mean, I do remember this quote when you started in 2008. And there was a whole premise where you feel that marketing is really a technology powered discipline, and therefore marketers have to infuse this tech into their DNA.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. And again, it's not to take away from the larger mission of marketing which is to find and engage and delight our customers. It's just that, in the past 10, 20 years, and accelerating even more in these past few years, the ways in which we reach those customers and engage with them are through all these digital channels. And to be honest, to do that, we're leveraging all sorts of amazing software. And so it's not that the software is somehow the top of the pyramid or the focus of what we're trying to do, but it's the enablement. It's the capability. It's how we actually achieve brilliant and amazing marketing in today's world.

WILSON RAJ: Absolutely. So let's kind of start from the top. How did this whole charting of the MarTech landscape start? I mean, there had to be some pivotal moment were you decided, you know what, I'm going to do some kind of a graphic out of this. And now that super graphic has really become sort of a hinge point for all kinds of discussions around digital marketing, digital strategy, digital transformation, as it relates to marketing. So how did that idea come about?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. Well, I think there were kind of two pivot moments there. So the first, as you mentioned, when I started writing my blog, I was really on a mission to help persuade CMOs that they needed more technical talent inside their organization just because marketing was becoming a true digital profession. And at the time, not everyone was buying into that.

WILSON RAJ: No, I think it was a hard sell, Scott.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. The world of IT and software seemed very far away from the world of marketing. So I remember, for one presentation, for a group of CMOs, I decided, all right, let me help them visualize this. And I put together that first slide of around 150 marketing technologies I found at the time. And it was entirely just to help people appreciate, oh my goodness, just how much technology is there in marketing. And again, even with just 150 at the time, it seemed mind blowing.

WILSON RAJ: That was mind blowing. Yeah. That's a lot.

SCOTT BRINKER: So that was kind of the first pivot. I think people were like, wow, OK, yes. There is a lot here. And then I remember the second pivot moment was, after doing that for a couple of years where it kept doubling year over year, in 2014, when all of a sudden it was like 1,000 solutions on the side. That was then like, OK, we're now going into some uncharted territory. This is a new dynamic.

WILSON RAJ: It's a new dynamic. It's a new threshold. Absolutely. So at that point, when you hit that mark-- I think, in the more recent one, we hit, what? Like 8,000 or something in 2020? And interestingly enough, about half of those things, I think like 2,000 plus, was around content and experience design. Another 2,000 was around social media. And then we definitely had quite a bit, almost a little over 1,000 around data, data management.

So when we hit that 1,000, that was a pivotal moment. Now, we're closing 10. Are we going to get there?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. In fact, actually, one of the reasons we haven't yet produced a 2021 version is the landscape just continues to grow so much it is an incredible logistical challenge to figure out, how do we research them all? How do we get them all on a slide, where we're actually trying to rethink the whole approach.

But to give you some sense of this, because I'm now not the only person who does this, there's people-- I don't know. These icon landscapes have become a cottage industry for so many tech areas. There was someone a couple months ago who put together a landscape of just marketing technologies associated with virtual events and video conferences. And just that landscape, focused on just that narrow category, had over 800 solutions mapped into it.

WILSON RAJ: Oh man. That's hitting that 1,000 threshold, that you mentioned, that was for all of MarTech.

SCOTT BRINKER: And now it's just this.

WILSON RAJ: It's crazy. And you know what else, Scott? You talk about the landscape. I remember, in the earlier versions, it was this very elaborate block diagrams. Right? And your latest one, it looks almost like a map from Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings II, or something like that. It's just islands and peninsulas and all kinds of geographical features going on there. So I'm really excited. I'm definitely looking forward to see what your other rendition, once we hit that 10,000 mark, will look like.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. Actually, I have to credit, it was the graphic designer who was helping me with that last one who-- The reason it is this sort of crazy free-form map is because the amount of time it took to constantly size and resize things within a rectangular box. And then the moment you come up with another logo, you have to go in and you have to resize everything and rearrange it. I mean, the graphic designer basically revolted, and said, not doing that anymore. How about we just put them here. We'll draw a line around them. I'm like, actually, that's kind of cool.

WILSON RAJ: Yeah. It seems organic enough. Right? So here's the thing. So you have seen this growth, this landscape evolving from 2014, even prior to that, all the way up to now. So what are the things that you're seeing that are pretty much the same, whether it's capability wise or thematically? And what are the things that you're seeing that are different, maybe that wasn't around even two years ago?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, great question. Well, I think the things that remain the same-- and I'm actually both happy and sad that they remain the same-- is I think the themes of what marketers generally want to leverage technology for are pretty constant. Right? I mean, we're still in this mode where we're like, OK, well, we want to find the right audience. We want to get them the right message at the right time, which is, frankly, where marketing should be thinking. That's our goal.

It's just, as the technology environment in which we're operating just continues to evolve, and there are new channels, and there are new tactics, and there are new audience preferences and all this, the technology to actually deliver on that promise continues to evolve. But, yeah, the overarching mission remains wonderfully constant. So that's our north star.

I think the things that are changing-- Boy, there's so many we can dive into. I'll highlight two. And then we might come back to them in this conversation in more detail. But one of them is this whole no code movement. And when I talk about no code, I don't mean just building apps without code. I mean this whole idea of saying, you as a general business user, you as a general marketer, to have more and more of these tools that you can create things, that not so long ago, you couldn't create on your own.

You would have had to hire software engineers or graphic designers or different experts. And for a whole bunch of things that we as marketers want to do or we want to experiment with, the costs and the barriers to doing that, it didn't make it worthwhile. But so many of these no code tools, they give a whole other level of things that now become accessible to us to experiment and try.

And then the second thing that's really interesting right now is really the reintegration of marketing into the rest of the organization. For the past decade, you could argue, a lot of this advancement in marketing technology, in a lot of cases, it happened independent of the rest of the organization, for good reasons, actually. In a lot of cases, the rest of the organization wasn't even ready to move forward at the speed that marketing needed to move forward with.

But things are changing. Part of this whole digital transformation is the recognition that it's not just marketing. It's the entire organization that becomes digitally powered and engages with customers through a digital interface. And so now there's all these really interesting things happening around how do we take all the marketing technology and connect it better with the rest of the organization, and vice versa. How do we harness more of the things that the rest of the organization is doing and leverage them in marketing?

WILSON RAJ: Right. I think, Scott, those two points, firstly, that low code, no code, that aspect, as it relates to marketers, is such a very fundamental difference between marketers of yore and today. Right? Not that we have to be coders, although it might seem that way, but the ability to be technologically savvy enough to understand where these apps, how they work, how to integrate. What's the data flow? What's a process flow? We're definitely going to dive into that because I think there's some interesting market reactions, or expectations at least, from the management level in terms of that.

And then the other one is, yes, right place, right time, right content. But then, boy, this has exploded to something broader than just marketing, kind of a business impact. So let's kind of take the first element around skill set. I think you referenced this, Scott, in one of your blogs also. A CMO council survey where there was a question around where the C-suite thinks that marketing has a gap, or a hole.

And the first one was 42% of that C-suite said that it's the modernization of MarTech, that includes the org, the systems, and the operations. And then right, I would say, close behind that, at 40%, was proficiency, technical proficiency. That kind of speaks to your low code, no code kind of point there. And then the others that followed was around that old chestnut, data, at a 37%, and everything related to data.

So when I looked at this, Scott, when I looked at what we think the acceleration of digital savviness in tech, especially since the COVID, and we hear that digital transformation has accelerated from years into months, I'm surprised at that first one, that modernization of systems and operations, with that 42% of the C-suite would still think, hey, marketers, you guys have a long way to go. What's your read on that? How do you read the stat?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. I mean, this data was surprising, but to me, it kind of makes sense through the lens of-- In some ways, I don't feel it's entirely fair to the marketing org because I do think marketing actually made tremendous advances, in many cases ahead of the rest of the organization. But I think where this is a perception issue, but also a bit of reality, is I do think marketing got a little bit too isolated on the MarTech stack.

And the problem with the MarTech stack is nobody else in the organization has visibility to that. And I think, in particular, what happened here, over these past couple of years, was a real acceleration of digital transformation of the rest of the business. The C-suite, all these other peers of the CMO, are looking at how they connect systems across the organization. And I think for a lot of CMOs, and I'll push some of this down to the marketing ops and marketing tech teams too, they were so focused on the MarTech stack, that I think we may have been a bit slow to catch on to this opportunity to say, OK, there's actually a second generation that's happening here. And it's not just our stack. It is the collective business stack. And how do we feed and work with that? And so I suspect that's part of what we missed.

But then also the digitally savvy, this sense of saying, oh, well, the C-suite doesn't necessarily think we have enough digitally savvy managers. I think that's fair. I don't think this is actually isolated to marketing. It's just the war for talent right now is so intense. And even organizations where they have great marketing operations, and great marketing tech people, very often they have a few people who are really amazing at that, and then perhaps they have a broader organization that's good at many, many things, but not necessarily as strong and really leveraging the state of the art technology.

And I think this is something that, for marketers, my takeaway from that would be, you can't just hire all this because this is the challenge, is the competitive war for talent. But it's like really leaning more into the enablement and training and development of internal talent. For years, marketers, we're so used to making such big investments in quote unquote "sales enablement," sales people better sell our solutions. It's almost like we need to take some of that energy and that creative insight and apply it to marketing enablement.

WILSON RAJ: Marketing enablement.

SCOTT BRINKER: That's helping our own marketing teams actually leverage all these capabilities that we're building out better.

WILSON RAJ: Scott, that's a huge point. You're right. Marketing traditionally-- and we still do-- we support sales. Ultimately, we have to show business results. From a C-suite perspective, that is typically revenue, profitability, reduction in costs, those kinds of things. Those are the numbers that C-suite look at. They're less interested in click through rates or use off assets. They have to be transformed to some kind of business metric. So I think you're right. How do we then enable?

And I love that point about perception stuff because I've seen a lot of brands, even at SAS, that acceleration of digital savviness. We're not the only ones. A lot of brands, CPG, retailers did that, accelerated in 2020. Right? I've never seen so much digital savviness, literally. And also experienced it for myself when I go to my bank or my grocer and so on. But I think, overall, in terms of what's the net effect of the business and other parts of the operation, that's where we have some more work to do there.

SCOTT BRINKER: And it's for the better, actually, because I think it's going to be a two-way street. I think, actually, because marketing does genuinely have so much experience that we've acquired over the tool sets and the tech stack that we have been using over the past 5, 10 years, I think we can bring a lot of insights to other functions of the business of how to leverage this and how to think of the right moments with the right customer.

But also I think we'll learn at that. I mean, if we just pick an area like the modern data stack, not just for marketing but for organizations as a whole, and how we're managing. This is obviously an area you guys know a lot about, but the whole analytics pipelines and machine learning. I mean, there's just so much that's advancing now throughout the rest of the organization. And I think there's so much marketers can learn from their peers in those organizations to, oh, that's the data set you have there. And, oh, that's how you're like. Yes, yes this is actually really well, we can use this.

And so I think it's actually going to be an incredible renaissance of this reintegration of marketing with these other functions. I think is going to be wonderful for everyone. And so I kind of expect that, two years from now, if they do this survey, it's going to be very different--

WILSON RAJ: It's going to be very different.

SCOTT BRINKER: --reception.

WILSON RAJ: I love the way you addressed it in the first. You were right around that modernization is certainly a perception and then that notion of technical savviness. We have a shortage of talent, but also at the same time, what can we do to do better marketing enablement? And then that's what that third element, that data piece, good customer data, but 37% of the C-suite said, hey, we've got some gaps here. That is the peril but also the opportunity, the promise, in terms of how we can activate that.

Now what can, from a data perspective, Scott, looking at it strategically, what can marketers, at all levels, from the CMO down, from her organization, leading it, to executives, to practitioners, to actual data scientists or marketing analysts, as it relates to data, what can we collectively do to up that number? Is it looking at different data sources or more of it within the org or slicing it into more infinite proportions? What are the things we can do to get that number up, that confidence level up?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. It's a great question. I think two things come to mind. So one, I mean again, marketing has traditionally had some very specific sources of data. It's the data that we pull in through our advertising channels. It's data we pull in through social media. It's data we pull from engagements on websites, which is great. That's been awesome.

But what's happening here, in the broader digital transformation, is we are seeing more and more digital touch points being created for customers that aren't about marketing touch points per se. They're actually the delivery of the service, the delivery of the product. I mean, you mentioned going to your bank, and how that process, and the way you use those apps, it's just totally different. And I think one of the greatest opportunities for marketing is to be able to make sure we are getting plugged into and instrumenting these behavioral activities of what customers are actually doing with our digital services and products at different points.

In SAS, obviously, this whole thing around product-led growth. Or if you're an app developer for the iPhone or Android, all these tools, the Pendos and whatnot of the world that people are using. I mean, oh my goodness, this is a goldmine of real data about real customers behaving in a way, and then using that to both understand them but also then to find the ideal opportunities where we can serve them better from a customer, marketing, customer lifecycle perspective. So yeah, I think that's probably the single greatest one.

But I think it's also connecting that flow in the other direction. Just as we want to be able to pull data from all those digital products and services, I think the data that we have from channels that we traditionally own, we should be doing a better job of feeding that data to those same digital products and services so that they can use that in the context of just personalizing the actual customer experience of their usage.

And so again, I think I'm just going back to that same theme of saying the opportunity to re-integrate marketing and MarTech with now a more savvy overall digital organization. I feel like a kid in a candy store just about about it. I mean, there's just so many opportunities with that.

WILSON RAJ: I think it's so important for the audience listening, and especially marketers who are listening in, that they get the sense of optimism. Yes, there are some perils of modernizing the stack, as well as improving in efficiency, our skill sets around data literacy, for example, or AI and so on. And one is, be the insights engine, not just for marketing, but for the business, and CX at large. And secondly, to be the collector, aggregator, of all the data that comes from literally every part of the organization. Right? And then play it back, either to them as part of the CX cycle, or to be able to revamp strategies. So I think that's a very important point, Scott, that you raised in terms of getting the confidence of the C-suite up.

SCOTT BRINKER: It's a great time to be in marketing.

WILSON RAJ: I love it.

SCOTT BRINKER: It's a challenging time, but it is a great time.

WILSON RAJ: Cool. OK, we're going to shift gears a little bit and take a little bit more panoramic view. The 2030 seems to be sort of this-- It's almost like a finish line for everything. So SAS, in late 2019, before the disruptions and all that, we did a world-wide survey around the future of experience, customer experience. It's called Experience 2030, where we had five different themes, themes around smart tech. From a consumer perspective, there's a lot of value there. Immersive tech, adoption of AR, IR, virtual reality, those kinds of things. Digital loyalty in the future. It's less about programs, but more about loyalty to the entire brand and experience. Obviously, data privacy, how that becomes a key part of the customer experience. And then this notion of agility and automation.

So we had these five drivers. And interestingly enough, I think you partnered with WPP, which is my former employer in a previous life, also with a 2030 title. I think you also had, about five. Is it five or four trends or something like that?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, it's five.

WILSON RAJ: You hit the 5 too. And let it be known to the audience that this was done absolutely independently. So tell us a little bit about that research title, and then what some of the top line findings and your observations with that, Scott.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, it makes me wonder, like, ah, all these people independently around the world, all of a sudden, get the idea of the number five, 2030. There's going to be some big event there. Yes, maybe it's the singularity.

WILSON RAJ: It could be.

SCOTT BRINKER: Maybe it's the aliens land.

WILSON RAJ: We could be responsible for that.

SCOTT BRINKER: But even if none of that amazing stuff happens, and it's simply a pinnacle for modern marketing, we'll take that.

WILSON RAJ: Yes.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, so the five themes, I love the five themes that you identified. And I think they're not mutually exclusive. I think they're actually complementary with the five themes that we leaned into. The five things we had were, not surprising, this no code citizen creator capability. I think just amazing what we can do today. Play that out over the next nine years, it's going to be mind blowing.

The second was a little bit abstract, but it was basically about getting people to think more about these patterns of platforms, networks, and marketplaces. I mean, so much of business has been organized for now the past 50 years around really this concept of hierarchies and chains. We have our value chain. We have our supply chain. We have our distribution chain. You know, and there's still value to those mental models, but in the digital world, there's this new set of models that are just proliferating inside our companies, in our supplier base, in the way we reach customers, and are these platforms networks and marketplaces. So really understanding those dynamics and how to leverage them.

The third is what I call the great app explosion which is a little bit like the MarTech landscape. But it's bigger than the MarTech landscape. I have a stat from the folks at IDC that they expect, in the next two years alone, there will be over 500 million digitally created apps and services out in the world. Now, not only--

WILSON RAJ: Imagine doing a landscape for that, Scott.

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. I'm waving the white flag there. Time to pick a new profession. But I mean, they're not all going to be commercially packaged SaaS applications. In fact, it's almost like an iceberg. The vast majority of them will be below the water line, as custom apps and digital services businesses create themselves.

But still, this is Mark Andreessen's prediction from a decade ago. It's like software is eating the world. And rather than keep fighting that, or keep saying, oh, well, this is just a blip. And it's all going to consolidate into one or two major software companies and we're done. We just need to embrace the reality that we live in a world of, for all practical purposes, infinite software. So how do we harness that? How do we actually make that a good thing?

And then that leads into the fourth trend which was talking about the shift from an emphasis on big data, just figuring out, oh my God, we've got all this data, how do we collect it? How do we store it? How do we analyze it? To increasingly, this challenge of why we call big ops because it's now how do we actually operationalize on that data? The operationalization of our businesses around that data, it's like not just one spot here, one spot there. It's like everyone in the organization. I'm using this for my algorithm here. I'm using it for this app here. Using this with my agents on the phone over there.

The metaphor I give people is if you imagine the world of big data as this faraway data lake, that we can think of the world of big ops, it's the same amount of water. But it's an interactive water park. And everyone's there, and they're coming in. And how do we make sense of that? How do we govern that new reality?

WILSON RAJ: And that's why your marketing enablement piece, I think, would fit in that, as part of that broader ops. So that's fantastic opportunity, yeah.

SCOTT BRINKER: Definitely. Definitely. And then the last topic was harmonizing human and machine. AI is just becoming more and more practical in how we can leverage it in so many different contexts. But I think we're still trying to learn like, OK, how do we do this? What's good for the machine to do? What's good for us to do? And where are the magical intersections where, actually, us working in tandem with these machines let us do outcomes that are beyond anything we could have imagined five years ago?

WILSON RAJ: I resonate with that last point especially. I always felt like humans are better at thinking meta, so judgment. We have that creativity to do messages and codes and things that would hit the human soul, the human heart. And we're also comfortable with dissonance. Whereas AI, I think we can do a lot of outsourcing of a lot of cumbersome, repetitive tasks, and then therefore free up humans to do a lot higher-order value add in marketing.

So I'm a big proponent of that last point. It's fantastic. Wow, there's so much. And we definitely have to carry on this conversation, for sure. But I think there's a great spot to wrap up this discussion, especially as we look at the things that you mentioned with MarTech 2030, the overlay against Experience 2030. Now, where can we find some of these great resources? Obviously, your blog. Any other spots you recommend?

SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. Actually, the blog chiefmartec.com.

WILSON RAJ: Yes.

SCOTT BRINKER: And that's chiefmartec, without the H at the end.

WILSON RAJ: That's right. That's the tricky part.

SCOTT BRINKER: Long story.

WILSON RAJ: We'll get that story in one of our conversations.

SCOTT BRINKER: But also, yeah, I'm @chiefmartec, the same spelling, on Twitter. So yeah, if you have a question, and you can reach out to me, always happy to engage with people. I'm continually learning as much from everyone else. Trying to just share some of that back into the world. So I'd love to engage with people around this stuff.

WILSON RAJ: And we'll make sure that all these are included in our show notes. Thank you, Scott. Has been fantastic as usual. I'm always energized after talking with you. So if you have enjoyed today's show, please head on over to SAS.com/ReimagineMarketingPodcast-- all one word-- to join in the conversation and get even more bonus content.

You can also subscribe to our series on your favorite podcast platforms. Just do a search, Reimagine Marketing. And you can also stay in touch by emailing us at reimaginemarketingpodcast@SAS.com. So this is Wilson Raj. Don't forget to join us again for another episode. And thank you for listening. Have a great day.

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