Inside Gartner Digital Marketing Conference 2018 (Part 1)

Gartner Digital Marketing Conference (#GartnerDMC) is where hundreds of marketing leaders from innovative, enterprise-level companies spend three days with Gartner Analysts and focus intensely on what’s next in marketing. Together these marketers evaluate trends, discuss benchmarks, dissect technologies and ultimately network and learn from each other. This year’s event was held in Sand Diego and the vision was “Think Big. Execute Smart. Deliver Growth” which is right in-line with what every marketer aspires to achieve.

Yet there are multiple themes under that large and inspirational umbrella. Here are 6 highlights (in 2 parts) that stood out to me and why I found them relevant:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in action

Artificial Intelligence in the marketing technology stack is no longer a future trend, but a reality and soon-to-be an expectation in B2C marketing. Yet it remains an area of experimentation in B2B, except for the platforms providing Search features with AI elements and Predictive Analytics technologies. One thing for sure – AI is fundamentally changing the face of marketing as we know it. First, with the promise of finally delivering relevance at scale. Second, with accelerating the already dizzying pace of change and skill development for marketers. Third, by slowly replacing human conversations with human-to-robot and eventually robot-to-robot conversations. With artificial intelligence soon-to-be the norm, marketers need to consider how our current technology is optimized towards human biases, interaction and reactions and how we will progress to this new technology.

Here’s an easy and cool way to start experimenting with AI for organization of any size – 14 WordPress plugins using AI and Machine learning

Growing Talent Gap

Hiring marketing talent with deep digital expertise, understanding of AI, proficiency in analytics, experience with mobile and deep subject matter knowledge were among top recommendations from almost every session discussing technologies and trends. As I’ve attended another session that highlighted hiring great talent as its take away, it is more and more apparent that there is a growing gap between the evolving technology and the capabilities of marketing teams.

As Bryan Yeager explained in his session, “Brand Relevance under Fire, Automation on the Rise”, most marketing organizations have “Traditional T”-shaped talent – generalists with a wide skill set and one or two areas of deep expertise. To keep up with the pace of change and digital complexity, the growing need is for the “Fat-T”-shaped talent – experts possessing multiple areas of deep expertise. Organizations must start planning for skill development, best talent attraction and retention strategies.

At an individual level, any marketer that wants to stay relevant in the next 5 to 10 years needs to take a long and serious look at understanding AI. Here’s a good long read, but an absolutely amazing one: Artificial Intelligence: Implications on Marketing, Analytics, and You

Quest towards Centralized Systems

The thing about any type of automation, at-scale personalization, and digital transformation initiatives – they will not work if there are technology and operational silos within an organization. There are two concepts that form a foundation for marketing best practices – single view of customer and a consistent, cohesive digital experience across entire customer journey - and they are not possible without centralized customer data, customer interactions and digital assets that are part of that customer’s journey.

The topic of centralization was approached from several different directions at the Gartner Conference, but the take away from different sessions was to start creating the foundation right now. This can be achieved by investing into data quality initiatives, systems that have robust integrations with IT and MarTech platforms and robust API capabilities, introducing consistent taxonomies and naming conventions for content across organization and finally assigning roles responsible for those initiatives.

In the next post I’ll discuss three more highlights from the conference: Decentralized Systems and Block chain, Limiting Beliefs and Evolution of Web. Stay tuned.