MarTech East 2019: Anand Thaker on what’s next for martech in 2020

Here are my takeaways from the event on what marketing leaders need to focus on to grow faster.

Below is the video’s full transcript.

Hi, everybody. It’s been a couple of days since the MarTech Conference in Boston, and I am still digesting all the great takeaways from it. But one thing that’s been running through my head has been, and it’s sort of an overall sentiment was, wow, I just feel like I received modern advanced training from executive management.

Hi, my name is Anand Thaker with IntelliPhi. You’ve probably seen me engaged in various aspects of the martech industry and lately, I’ve been leveraging martech as a lens and inspiration to elevate growth leaders and investors.

It’s been an exciting year for martech overall. Right? We’ve seen a flurry of acquisitions. We’ve seen lots of change and a rapid evolution of leadership. And we also know that the profession has been working to build these matching bookends – leadership and customer-centricity.

I thought the speakers did a great job in their sessions of not only how do you build those bookends but how to fill in between very nicely. I wanted to take you down three different themes that I saw throughout the conference.

The first is agility and disruption. If customers are dynamic, shouldn’t leadership and the talent be enabled and empowered to help business operations match that cadence? You know, extrapolating for that new evolution Scott Brinker talks to us and shares with us this concept of platforming marketing and how that is leading into these different levels of maturity throughout the organization starting from the voice of the customer, the customer experience within marketing.

Agile, elevates us from one stage of the next is where Matt LeMay comes in with the spirited support of his turtle, Sheldon, where they take us down a journey of agile adoption from denial to adoption. He also reminds us, and I got to hear this from some observations from fellow moderator Jeff Eckman and privacy expert Duane Schulz, where we all kind of heard this concept and where cross-functional approach is necessary to better understand the customer, but also to orchestrate how you engage with that customer and continue to build on that community. Marketing, technology and management as nearly and completely blended.

Also, while martech is transforming marketing, it’s also serving as inspiration on how the organization needs to change, and it’s creating that transformation.

One of my favorite analysts, Charlene Li, is the principal analyst at Altimeter Group. You may have heard of some of her books, “Groundswell” and “Open Leadership.” She’s recently released “Disruption Mindset,” which details how this is done. We got a taste of this at the conference. In her session she talks about these secret ingredients within strategy, leadership in culture, on why some companies make the transformation and thrive and others struggle through transformation or struggled after a transformation.

The second theme wasn’t necessarily about data, but it was really talking about how do you advance your tech focus beyond the acquisition of data? Right? So the second theme was about intelligence privacy. Oh yeah, and that operational thing where, guess what? It is the competitive advantage for next-generation brands. Smarter orchestration, adaptable operations, anything from taxonomy and personalization to privacy and attribution.

One of things fellow moderator and executive recruiter extraordinaire Erica Seidel talks about is this idea that there were a lot of conversations around the struggle between orchestrating, being creepy and the idea of convenience. So is it CDP? I heard this in one of the sessions is a CDP or CDB? So with that joke aside, we’re actually moving beyond the definition of customer data platforms. A lot of the focus has started to become how do we, more importantly, move from these disparate data sources and start to value and justify the investment in a centralized data source.

Of course, the next thing AI who isn’t talking about “to AI or not to AI.”  But I particularly loved Chris Penn’s session who really opened the box about AI and the practical uses in building a toolkit for marketing.

The third theme is marketing is facing an identity crisis. Perry Hewitt, Erica Seidel and Anita Brearton all held sessions that explored how to give yourself permission. One of the eight P’s of marketing, as Scott had delivered on his opening talk, will emerge beyond just order taking on tactics and starting to drive strategy.

So there’s tons to marinate on. What did I miss?

Please share your comments and thoughts. We look forward to seeing you in San Jose at the next event in April 2020.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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About the author

Anand Thaker

Anand is an industry leader, builder and advisor in marketing technology and growth strategy. His 15 years include marketing, operations, sales, data, analytics and intelligent systems. He thrives where people, data and money intersect. Advisor to growth leaders and investors. Builder of smart tools enabling smart people. Investor favoring product-led growth (PLG) companies. In recent years, he has been the co-collaborator with Scott Brinker on the Marketing Technology Landscape. He is an advisor to the CDP Institute and a co-host of the Talking Stack podcast. Bringing a multi-disciplinary background, Anand founded IntelliPhi to enable growth leaders to navigate complex go-to-market decisions by leveraging data, AI-enabled systems, and their seasoned leadership. Their Apollo platform was recently acquired by a top management consulting firm. He's worked for growth teams within enterprise companies such as Siemens, Silverpop/IBM, Microsoft, Blackstone, Salesforce.com, Fidelity, NYSE and eBay. With some entrepreneurial wins and losses, Anand is a retained advisor to select startups and investors navigating remarkable returns. He's also known for having a knack for identifying and cultivating rising sales, marketing and entrepreneurial leaders.