At MarTech Conference, Aetna’s MTO Says Marketing Technology Can’t Exist In A Silo

Marketing technology has to be integrated with all parts of a organization to be effective, said Joseph Kurian today during the opening session of the Martech conference in San Francisco.

Kurian, the Head of Marketing Technology & Innovation at Aetna, the third-largest health insurance company in the US, joined the company in 2013 and began developing a marketing technology group. One of his first goals was to make sure that technology was integrated across the entire enterprise.

“We cannot exist in a silo,” Kurian told the audience, while explaining that marketing tools have to work with other internal systems in order to drive company-wide business decisions.

Pillars Of A Marketing Technology Office

For attendees that are in the process of growing the role of marketing technology in their companies, Kurian offered his list of three pillars of a marketing technology office:

1. Marketing is heavily reliant on technology. Much of it is in-house or SaaS at a vendor. We should control budget and destiny of our future.
2. Let marketers worry about marketing and not worry about the tech stack, vendors, internal adoption or enterprise rollout.
3. IT (information technology) is not the place for this. They are strong with infrastructure, scalability and security, but weaker on speed, business value and alignment to business goals.

He emphasized that executive level buy-in is a key for success in building a marketing technology organization inside your company. “Your boss and your boss’s boss have to be on board.”

The MarTech Conference continues today and tomorrow. You can follow the #martech hashtag on Twitter for more from speakers and attendees.

Postscript: Here’s Joseph’s slide deck from this presentation.