PLUG IN TO

MARKETINGTECHNOLOGY

Sponsored by

Marketers are spoiled for choice when it comes to tech tools that aim to give them an edge.

Pg. 5 The Merger of Ad Tech & Mar Tech

Pg. 7 Adopt Marketing Technology That Improves Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Pg. 8 Is “Marketing Experiences” Technology Risky Business?

Pg. 9 Is Marketing Tech as Innovative as Vendors Claim?

Pg. 10 CMOs Do IT Fast, CIOs Do IT Slow

Pg. 11 Stoking the Fire of Marketing Innovation

Pg. 13 Consumers Are the Center of the Technology Storm

Pg. 14 Demystifying Marketing Tech

Pg. 15 Four of Five CMOs Unable to Keep Up With Tech Demands

Pg. 16 Marketing Technology Is Imperative to CMOs’ Success

Pg. 17 Businesses Are Hungry for Technology Stacks [Infographic]

Marketing technology is a massive force in the shift in marketing workflow. For many marketers it’s been a key enabler as they transition campaigns and other marketing initiatives to be more contextual, digital, personal, and targeted.

Today, marketers have more access to technology than ever before, but there’s still work to be done before they can fully capitalize on their mar-tech investments. Fragmentation persists, choice is over-whelming, and lines are blurring between the CMO and CIO. Budgets are increasingly strained by the emergence of new, essential technological capabilities. In fact, according to Walker Sands, 69% of mar-keters polled say tight budgets are holding them back from investing in new technology. But that’s not the only challenge. Respondents also cite the difficulty of implementing new solutions (35%) and internal resistance (33%) as challenges to marketing-tech adoption.

Despite the challenges that this state of technological flux presents, marketers are adapting. Here, we’ve collected a series of recent Direct Marketing News content that specifically focuses on the ways marketers have, and can, continue to thrive in the turbulent marketing-tech space. –Perry Simpson

Marketers and advertisers have two cru-cial goals in common: Both want to drive revenue and each group works to drive the actions of consumers. So, it’s no surprise that in recent years there’s been a convergence between advertising technology and marketing automation.

“Both ad tech and mar tech are getting at the same problem: the huge explosion of data in the ecosystem,” says Matthew Greitzer, cofounder and COO of program-matic media buying company Accordant Media. “And while trying to make sense of that data, the legacy systems that have existed for the last decade or more are simply no longer sufficient. So, new tech-nology is needed to help marketers and advertisers power the data-based deci-sions that they want to make.”

Along with that explosion of data, the recent union between ad tech and marketing automation is on fire be-cause of the rise of programmatic—i.e. automated systems—in both sectors. Each set of tools, no doubt, are meant to drive performance for advertisers and marketers, and programmatic fu-

els the flames. But what sparked this fire? Mergers and acquisitions, says Ed Montes, chief revenue officer at DataXu, a programmatic marketing platform for brands and agencies.

“There will be more consolidation of the current providers,” Montes says. “When you look at both categories there’s a tremendous number of new entrants in the space on both sides over the last 10 years.” He adds that many companies want to be platform service providers that meet every part of a busi-ness’s needs. “We’ve gone through a lot of hyper-investing over the last de-cade. Now these companies will start to mature, and as that process happens, you’ll have winners and losers. And I think we’ll see the landscape of provid-ers change over the next few years.”

DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT PASTS; STRIKINGLY SIMILAR FUTURESJonathan Moran, senior product marketer of customer intelligence at data giant SAS, says that ad technology and marketing technology have traditionally different

focuses. He says that in the past, ad tech-nology has focused on audience moneti-zation, display advertising, location-based targeting, mobile marketing, networks and exchanges, video and television, and, usually, third-party data.

Marketing technology, however, has had entirely different focuses: campaign management, contact optimization, cus-tomer data, email marketing, event trig-gers, lead management, and lifetime value.

The intersection of both can be found as strategists work to meet several of these goals. Moran says, for example, that advertisers can use predictive mod-eling and lifetime value to inform mobile and display ad content. Marketers can use third-party data, combine it with first-party customer data, and inform marketing messages and content.

Bottom line: ad tech and mar tech are coming together.

“The end state for both of them is the delivery of contextually relevant mes-sages,” Moran says. “Advertisers who focus on display advertising want to put up a digital ad that’s relevant. They want people to act on it. They want people to convert. The same is the case for marketing technology. It’s delivered in a different manner with marketing technol-ogy. But the end state is the delivery of a personalized message, which someone then acts on—and eventually converts.”

SPOTTING THE BIG TECH TRENDSAnalysts say that there are several ma-jor trends in ad technology and mar-keting automation that make this once unforeseen merger inevitable. Echoing much of the same sentiment as Mo-ran, Accordant Media’s Greitzer breaks down the trends he feels are pushing this recent tech fusion. “The biggest trends in ad tech, I think, are the rise of programmatic media and the ability to

THE MERGER OF AD TECH & MAR TECHMore companies today are linking advertising technology and marketing automation. Here’s a breakdown of what that union means for customers—and for each industry’s future. By Natasha D. Smith

deliver messages on a one-to-one basis to consumers,” he says. “Marketers and advertisers want technology that enables them to deliver creative [that’s] specif-ically based on what [they] know about the consumer: the ability to pick and choose who [they] want to deliver an ad to—which [they] couldn’t do in a pre-pro-grammatic world. It’s a trend that’s allow-ing the convergence of the two.”

DataXu’s Montes says with certainty that he can pinpoint the biggest trend in both technologies. “To me there’s a trend that’s different from the ability to just use data. The trend is activating data,” he says. “Now you have this data, you want to take advantage of it. You want to use it for buying; you want to use it for analysis; you want to use it to inform your creative, etcetera. So, that [data activation] is cer-tainly a trend in both.”

THE EFFECTS OF TECH MERGERS ON CUSTOMERSHigh customer expectations leave advertisers and marketers with no choice: Use both ad tech and marketing automation or fall behind. “The whole reason that we’re seeing this shift is because of the more educated consumer today,” says Bridget Bidlack, VP of enterprise products at Rocket Fuel, a programmatic marketing and media buying company. “Consumers are tied to their phones; they’re tied to their Internet. They basically want to interact with a marketer or advertiser on their terms. And how they interact with a marketer isn’t always the same. It’s whatever is convenient at that time.”

Bidlack adds that customers expect marketers or advertisers to tie all of the information together from each of their interactions. And she insists that the convergence of ad tech and marketing automation enables companies to meet these lofty demands.

“Those marketers and advertisers who do that—who unite both technologies—re-ally have an edge over their competitors,” Bidlack continues. “They can start where the consumer wants them to start, really build on what they know about that cus-tomer, and then get them the right offer.”

Those right offers made possible by

tech mergers are making more custom-ers happy, says SAS’s Moran. “At the end of the day people don’t want an offer that they consider to be spam, is not relevant to them, or has no applica-tion to where they are along their buying journey or path to purchase,” he says. “And because consumers are getting personalized messages across all media types—as a result of the merger of ad tech and mar tech—they’re feeling that brands understand them more. They feel like a brand understands where they are and knows what they need to get a goal accomplished. That builds loyalty, and it turns people into brand advocates.”

IMPACT ON THE BOTTOM LINEThat insight and advocacy often leads to one place: revenue. “It’s a huge op-portunity for marketers and advertisers to unlock revenue,” Accordant Media’s Greitzer says. “So many opportunities open up, like what they understand about their customers’ needs and what they understand about how a customer wants to be serviced. All of those things can be untapped with the convergence of technology. Better relevance drives better performance.”

Of course, most every marketer and advertiser aims to boost revenue. As the sales benefits of using these technolo-gies become more apparent, adoption follows. “From a revenue perspective, we’re certainly seeing more volume and revenues growing year-over-year. And we’re not seeing any decelera-tion of adoption [of ad tech and mar tech]. In fact, it’s quite the contrary,” says DataXu’s Montes. “We’re seeing acceleration. Overall, the market data that I have seen has shown the growth in revenue and growth in technology. That means a continual growth in the

intersection between the two.” In es-sence, Greitzer says, the fusion of both technologies makes things better for the customers, and that leads to more sales and revenue. “The more technology en-ables us to get the right message to the right person at the right time, the better the return on investment,” he says.

A MORE CREATIVE AND INTELLIGENT OUTLOOKCurrent trends, customer expectations, and positive effects on the bottom line all point to one thing: the eventual dis-appearance in the distinction between ad tech and mar tech. “I do see these two worlds really coming together,” says Rocket Fuel’s Bidlack. In fact, she predicts that both technologies will come together because advertis-ers and marketers want better tools to understand and map the customer journey, and they need one single view of each customer. “I see ad tech and mar tech working together to bridge the known and anonymous users,” Bidlack continues. “Marketers and agencies don’t want to log in to two different plat-forms that are telling them two different things. You shouldn’t have to log in to five different platforms to understand your customers and their behaviors.”

She says the convergence of mar-keting automation and ad technology allows all of the data to exist in a single platform, which provides clarity, frees up time, and sparks new ideas. “As we continue to see this consolidation of ad tech and mar tech, we need to be inno-vating. Especially smaller ad tech com-panies—and even smaller marketing tech companies—which can take a little bit bigger risks. They can build solutions that are keeping up with the times.”

Keeping up with the times means more satisfied customers and more time to focus on strategy and creative that’ll make a lasting impact. “Go out. Explore. Discover,” Bidlack says. “There’s already a lot of great synergy between ad tech and mar tech. And really it’s just about coming together and sharing informa-tion so that marketers and advertisers can continue these conversations with customers no matter where they are.”

THERE’S ALREADY A LOT OF GREAT SYNERGY BE-TWEEN AD TECH AND MAR TECH.

Beware the marketers who lack a basic understanding of their customers.

“Customers are getting impatient with brands…and with irrelevant messag-ing,” Rusty Warner, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, said during his pre-sentation at Forrester’s 2015 Forum for Marketing Leaders. According to Warner, customers today are value-driven, more digitally savvy, and advertising-averse. The more than 3,000 messages consumers are exposed to each day becomes mostly noise they ignore.

“Brands need to be contextually rele-vant in this environment,” Warner warned. He pointed out what marketing looks like with and without context.

Before context: After context:Campaigns InteractionsTargeting EngagingCustomer segmentation Customer recognitionMedia schedules Customer momentsMessages UtilityTransactions Value exchangeGRPs and CMPs Minutes of engagement

“Campaigns aren’t dead,” Warner said, “but marketers need to launch interac-tions. Don’t just close the deal, customers are looking for a value exchange…. It’s all about making the most of the moments you have with customers.”

The technology that underlies this? Ac-cording to Warner, it’s a contextual mar-keting engine. Unfortunately, marketers can’t just buy one and plug it in.

“Contextual marketing remains aspira-tional,” Warner said. “Marketers are mostly kidding themselves about the capabilities they have.”

According to Forrester, 63% of market-ers surveyed say their current tech portfo-lio is too complex and 55% say they have redundancies in technologies.

Enter the enterprise marketing software suite (EMSS) to help address all this. An EMSS, Warner said, helps marketers to:· Understand customers across their lifecycle· Improve marketing campaign effectiveness· Enable more coherent marketing planning

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE DATA (INTEGRATION)When marketers look for EMSS, they usually start with customer data man-agement and cross-channel campaign management capabilities, Warner said, noting that 88% of marketers surveyed chose an EMSS based on its ability to provide multiple capabilities as part of a single suite. But all is not rosy.

According to Warner, marketers see opportunities for improvement from EMSS providers in data integration and management capabilities, analytics, and business understanding. In fact, in-tegration is a must for most marketers who use an EMSS. Consider the sen-timent of marketers Forrester surveyed about EMSS:

78% say the ability to integrate is the most important feature71% say integration with non-mar-keting technology is a priority66% say best of breed is less im-portant than the ability to integrate

“No one vendor provides a 100 per-cent complete solution,” Warner said. “So, prioritize customer data manage-ment and analytics; and then select campaign management or digital mar-keting based on your customer needs.”

Warner advised marketers to look at point solutions to complement core EMSS functionality. “Prioritize predictive analytics and digital intelligence…,” he recommended. “Then integrate chan-nel-specific execution and personaliza-tion.” But most of all, he said, choose an EMSS for ease of integration.

ADOPT MARKETING TECH THAT IMPROVES YOUR SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIOThe silver lining to look for from today’s marketing clouds: context. By Ginger Conlon

The marketing technology business is booming. At this point the “landscape” is more like a universe, with nearly 1,900 vendors serving marketers. But, as much as marketers may want it all, there’s only so much technology that any one com-pany can buy—and, frankly, only so much that they really need. The result: Not sur-prisingly, different types of marketing tech-nologies are growing at different rates, as well as being funded to varying degrees.

A cursory look at the “Marketing Technology Landscape” that ion interactive CTO Scott Brinker created earlier this year as compared to ones he created prior show significant growth in the marketing experiences area. This includes tools for content, email, mobile, search, social, video, and much more. In other words, technologies that help marketers provide the optimal customer experiences at specific touchpoints.

Being a data junky, RJMetrics CEO and Cofounder Robert J. Moore decided to figure out why the marketing experience category is outpacing other areas so significantly, and what that might mean in terms of their value.

“Investors want to know where they should be investing,” Moore says. To me, this includes marketers looking to invest in the “right” technology not only for their immediate needs, but also for longer-term needs. “And entrepreneurs want to know what type of company they should start next, or how the market that they’re cur-rently in is developing,” he adds.

GROWTH MODEFirst, Moore discovered that over the past five years growth in the marketing experi-ences category has surpassed growth in all of the other categories. For example, 120 marketing experiences companies launched in 2012, as opposed to only 69

new companies across all other catego-ries combined. Second, he noticed how narrowly focused many of the companies are as compared to businesses in many other categories. Based on that, he sur-mised that these smaller companies might be less valuable, as well: “The billion-dollar question [behind my research] is, ‘If there are more marketing experiences compa-nies because each of them is more nar-rowly focused, is the average company worth less?’”

According to Moore’s research, the mean amount of funding that marketing experiences companies received is $25 million; this is the lowest amount among any category in Brinker’s infographic.

In fact, infrastructure companies re-ceived more than twice the funding than marketing experiences organizations. And even marketing operations companies are better funded than businesses that pro-vide tools for marketing experiences.

That said, Moore wasn’t convinced that funding equates to “value.” As he points out, it may require less capital to build and run a company that pro-vides marketing experience technolo-gies. So, Moore looked at number of employees, because that tends to be a

growth indicator. In this area marketing experiences companies also lag.

It seems, however, that neither of these issues is negative. On the contrary, seem-ingly, it takes less capital and staff to launch and run a marketing experiences compa-ny than it does for other organizations in other marketing technology categories, Moore surmised. These lower barriers to entry have translated to a flood of new op-tions in the marketing experiences area.

For marketers, these findings should be a not-so-subtle reminder to conduct thor-ough research into which marketing-tech vendors will be right for their organization’s marketing strategy; and not rush to judge, positively or negatively, based on factors that might be misleading.

IS “MARKETING EXPERI-ENCES” TECHNOLOGY RISKY BUSINESS?The fastest growing area of marketing technology seems to be the least funded, but that might not be a bad thing. By Ginger Conlon

“There’s a lack of innovation in market-ing technology,” says Robert Tas, SVP and CMO of Pegasystems. In fact, Tas, a marketing veteran whose background includes running digital marketing at JP Morgan Chase, says marketing automa-tion workflow hasn’t changed much since the technology first came to market.

“John Wanamaker still wouldn’t know how his ad spending is performing,” he adds. “Marketers today are no closer to knowing than he was. With all the great data available, we’re still 10 to 15 years behind where I thought we’d be by now.”

Indeed, marketers struggling to keep pace with escalating consumer expecta-tions need a solution now—one that will help them today, as well as over the medi-um term. “The next five years will be about delivering on the promise of customer ex-perience and connecting systems,” says Tas, adding that customer experience

requires a C-level commitment to real-ly make it work. “And with digital driving more interactions, marketers are trying to figure out where they need to invest.”

Of course, it’s hard to plan for the next five years when marketers are still planning for next quarter—and they expect their plans to continually change. As Tas puts it, “There’s no rest in marketing.”

But marketers need to start somewhere. One area that Tas recommends paying spe-cial attention to is customer interactions. Fo-cusing on customers’ experiences across channels, as opposed to interactions with a single campaign, will help companies’ branding come to life, he says.

“Many companies are too cam-paign-centric. Branding is and will stay im-portant, but how brands come to life will change,” Tas asserts. “[Marketers] have to respect customers across processes. A website should know who a customer is.

That site should be connected to the ser-vice organization, online community, etc. You can’t not be connected.”

So how can marketers achieve this con-nectivity? One way, he says, is by improving cross-channel processes and viewability into the outcome of their marketing spend. Unfortunately, however, for most marketers there’s “a lack of viewability into the details of their marketing spend,” Tas says, adding that few marketers have a well-integrated marketing supply chain—and fewer still can or do report on it.

“Process is a competitive necessity,” he stresses, adding that tools need to adapt to a marketing organization’s work-flow, not the other way around.

So, it’s up to the CMO to be the new systems integrator, Tas says. “You couldn’t build a car with siloed data and disconnected processes,” he says. “Mar-keters need to integrate.”

IS MARKETING TECH AS INNOVATIVE AS VENDORS CLAIM?One marketing automation insider asserts that marketing technology needs to get back to the future. By Ginger Conlon

It’s the everyday, never-ending tussle of the digital marketing era. Why can’t the CMO and CIO put aside their petty dif-ferences, tear down their silos, and lead their companies to digital supremacy? In fact, that might be the wrong way for se-nior managers to wrap their heads around the problem, argues an 18-year IBM vet-eran who has evangelized the compa-ny’s middleware across the globe. CMOs and CIOs are different, he says, because they’re supposed to be different. There are two different types of IT: fast, the prov-ince of marketers; and slow, the bailiwick of IT people. CIOs and CMOs need only to recognize it and shore up their skills at managing their stations in the fortress—marketers on the battlements, techs in the command center. The rest will come easy because each of their efforts should feed the success of the other.

“You have two worlds in tech today: fast and slow,” says Dario DeBarbieri, global director of IBM Middleware. A mu-tual acquaintance recommended that I speak with DeBarbieri because he, if any-body, would be the one able to explain to me the API economy. “One is the front

end. That means your mobile apps, your tablets, your computers, everything you can see,” DeBarbieri held forth in his af-fable Argentinian accent. “That’s what we call the fast-moving IT. You basically are at mercy of clients. Why? Because clients and end-users have the power they didn’t have in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“Slow IT is the back end. It needs to maintain secure, accurate, constant com-munication throughout the ecosystems,” he continued, making the point that mar-keting still keeps its eyes on the four P’s and IT still controls the mainframes. What’s difficult for enterprises is synchronizing the disparate timing of the two operations.

Not only do marketers need to track the demands of smartphone-spoiled cus-tomers and monitor their trash-talking on social media, but they also have to stay on top of emerging digital business models such as those of Uber and Airbnb. “You can imagine how car rental companies and hotels are taking a new look at their operations,” DeBarbieri says. “There are a lot of new businesses being created by this API economy that are turning old busi-nesses on their heads.”

That message, says DeBarbieri formed the central theme of a presentation he gave to 50 CMOs just last week. “I told them it was vitally important to their fu-tures that they develop an ability to identify which are the core business assets of their companies that could extend their busi-ness models if they exposed them through APIs. That is the role of the CMO today. The CMO should be in charge of the strat-egy surrounding fast IT, but he must work more closely than ever with the develop-ment team in slow IT. Together they can start pushing buttons and changing busi-ness models.”

CMOs are also responsible for deciding what kind of API fits the purpose, which could be anything from brand recognition to revenue generation to customer satis-faction. DeBarbieri outlined the four basic API models with examples of each:

Developer pays. This is used by Am-azon Web services, which charges fees for developers to launch APIs and for ad-ditional services.

Developer gets paid. Google Ad Sense, for instance, pays developers that run its ads on their apps.

Free. Facebook doesn’t charge pub-lishers that add APIs to the network be-cause they end up driving new traffic and business to Facebook.

Indirect channel linkage. EBay lets de-velopers link APIs in return for the opportuni-ty to expand its ecosystem and its business.

But before API expansion can get to this stage at a company, fast IT jockeys must track real-time events and slow IT operators must identify long-term trends and commercial corporate assets. If they’re vigilant and they’re working well together, the API economy can help them churn gold from, well…

“Elephant dung,” DeBarbieri says. “Every day the world creates 2.5 quintillion bits of data. I tell clients it’s elephant dung. It’s s—t. But if you sift through it and understand the API economy, you can find opportunities.”

CMOs DO IT FAST, CIOs DO IT SLOWThey’re not alike. They were never meant to be and they never will be. But they were fated to join together to do battle in the API economy. By Al Urbanski

Savvy marketers are using data and technology to ignite the flames of inno-vation and raise the bar for the industry and their competitors. Direct Marketing News is recognizing those leaders with its inaugural Marketing&Tech Innova-tion Awards.

The awards honor the outstand-ing use of technology and data to de-vise innovative marketing strategies in seven categories: content marketing, cross-channel integration, digital-print, email marketing, marketing automa-tion, mobile, and social. But the awards program isn’t just about the tools mar-keters use to innovate. Data scientists and marketing technologists are in-dispensable drivers of ensuring that technology is an asset, not just a tool. The Stars of MarTech categories honor those experts.

Finalists stood out for their strategy, innovative approach, and results. Read on to meet the winners of the 2015 Mar-keting&Tech Innovation Awards, learn their success secrets, and get inspired to turn up the heat in your marketing or-ganization. –Ginger Conlon

CONTENT MARKETING, CROSS-CHANNEL INTEGRATION, DIGITAL-PRINT INNOVATION THREE-PEAT WINNER: KLICK HEALTHShrewd marketers know that in an over-crowded digital marketing landscape, print can be a persuasive standout. That’s why digital agency Klick Health decided to fuse the efficiency of digital marketing and the authenticity of print communi-cation to create a powerful campaign targeting healthcare professionals. The campaign, entitled Katalyst, is the 2015 Marketing&Tech Innovation Awards win-ner of three categories: Content Market-ing Innovation, Cross-Channel Campaign Integration, and Digital-Print Innovation.

“The message of this campaign was that we think deeply about strate-gy and…about how to help our clients achieve significant impact through their digital activities,” says Peter Flaschner, SVP of client experience at Klick Health. “The target [audience] was marketers in the healthcare space.” Klick compiled an extensive list of direct mail targets that primarily consisted of marketers for phar-maceutical and biotech companies.

The strategy to reach that audience was ingenious, and somewhat counterintuitive.

Rather than tell potential clients about the agency’s digital marketing services, marketers at Klick Health decided to show them. The team created a glossy, 193-page hardcover book that took readers on the journey of a fictitious cli-ent, Rellyant. The manuscript displayed several tools and strategies for a market-ing campaign—elements that real-world clients might want to use. It gave readers a sense of what digital marketers at Klick could do for them.

The book, however, was far from ordinary.It included one unique element: an

embedded seven-inch LCD monitor in-side the cover. That touchscreen featured videos, such as a welcome message

from Klick’s CEO, and infused a digital el-ement into an otherwise traditional book. The agency sent copies to more than 2,200 marketers who requested it.

A SURPRISING TWISTWhy include print when today’s market-ing landscape is dominated by digital?

“At a digital agency print is unex-pected. So, that makes it a little bit more noteworthy. Naturally, people will ask, ‘Why are they doing that?’” Flaschner explains. “That’s one reason for the print-digital combination. We don’t sug-gest that print is going away or that dig-ital is better than print. We believe that each has a specific purpose.”

Indeed, after prospects received the digital manuscript, Klick followed up with a series of personalized emails and phone calls. Flaschner says that by merging digital and print—essentially, creating a cross-channel campaign—marketers at Klick were able to create the biggest im-pact on potential customers. He stress-es that digital drives specific action from readers, and print helps tell long-form stories and encourages browsing.

“Through this campaign, we were trying to show that digital and print are merging and that leadership in print could come from digital thinking,” Flaschner says. “You can, in fact, combine moving images and sound with something as tra-ditional as print.”

He says the combination solved the challenge of holding prospects’ attention. “We’re strong believers in the use of dig-ital in marketing. But in the case of try-ing to make a complex argument, we felt that sending someone a 25-pound book was going to make our point strongly.”

NEW APPROACH, NEW BUSINESSThe strategy worked. Over the course of the 10-month campaign Klick received hundreds of calls, had dozens of meet-ings, and earned four new clients, which

STOKING THE FIRE OF MARKETING INNOVATIONWinners of the 2015 Marketing&Tech Innovation Awards are tops in using technology and data as tinder to create sparks with their marketing.

resulted in about $20 million of new busi-ness and more than a 330% return on investment. The digital-print campaign, Flaschner asserts, created new experi-ences for potential customers and is a remarkable way to connect.

“This was really a break-out brand-ing piece for us,” he says. As a Toron-to-based agency, marketers wanted to let potential clients in the United States know what Klick could do for them. He says his team wanted to be innova-tive, which Flaschner defines as doing something that’s “not been done” and that gets results above and beyond previous campaigns.

“The combination of print and digi-tal was innovative, for sure. A great big book from a digital company is actually pretty forward-thinking,” he says. “And the results from the new relationships that were started [from this campaign] were certainly innovative. We drove a lot of new business.”

To create the most innovative and integrated campaigns, Flaschner says that marketers should always be willing to step outside their comfort zone—even if it means doing something counterintu-itive. “We’re always trying to create more of an impact,” he says. “And to be hon-est, I’m always a little bit nervous every time we try something that’s new. It’s al-ways a bit scary, but exhilarating.” –Nata-sha D. Smith

EMAIL MARKETING INNOVATION: CITIEmail marketing may be mature, but that doesn’t make it lackluster—just look at Citi’s campaign for its Citi Simplicity Card. The company’s U.S. credit card division leveraged semantic algorithms and natural language processing to generate emails that resonated with existing customers on an emotional level and led them to open new credit card accounts. And although this was a novel approach for Citi, the fi-nancial services company was willing to test and learn to generate results.

CALCULATING THE VALUE OF EMOTIONCiti wanted to use email to encourage exist-ing customers to open a new Citi Simplicity

Card account. But marketers at the finan-cial services organization knew that credit cards weren’t exactly an enticing topic. So, for its new Citi Simplicity Card cam-paign, the team sought to turn dry subject lines and copy into engaging messages that would resonate with customers emo-tionally and, ultimately, get them to review the emailed credit card offer and click through to an application.

INVESTING IN TECHNOLOGYTo achieve its objectives, Citi began using Persado’s Persuasion Automation plat-form. The technology quantifies language and emotions by combing through a pro-prietary database of scored and tagged language components and then explor-ing different combinations through se-mantic algorithms and natural language processing. This enables the platform to mathematically derive relevant messages that drive actions.

“We wanted to take a non-traditional approach to [determine] how do we opti-mize our email?” Geoffrey Sanders, SVP of digital marketing for Citi’s U.S. credit cards division, said at the Direct Market-ing News 2015 Marketing&Tech Innova-tion Summit in New York, emphasizing that Citi has a “very rigorous” test-and-learn culture.

In the initial exploration phase, Per-sado’s platform explored more than one million message variants before deter-mining the top 16 through further anal-ysis. Although the variants all contained the same offer, the messages varied in terms of calls-to-action, product fea-tures, and positioning. Using Citi’s CRM

system, the companies then ran the Persado-generated messages against a sample audience to measure which messages generated the most engage-ment. After verifying which messages recipients engaged with the most, the companies ran a validation phase, in which they sent messages containing the most engaging elements to the re-mainder of Citi’s target audience.

PROVING THAT RISK-TAKING PAYS OFFThe campaign ran from April 16 to May 30, 2014. The results generated during that time frame are, according to Sand-ers, “staggering.” During the validation phase the Persado-generated subject lines produced a 65% lift in open rates compared to the control subject lines. What’s more, the Persado-generated email bodies experienced a 118% in-crease in click-through rates compared to the control messages. According to Citi, this lift directly correlated to a “signif-icant increase” in card approvals.

“We learned that it was much more effective to have an emotional hook,” Sanders said. For instance, instead of fill-ing its subject lines with financial jargon, Citi includes phrases that evoked a sense of urgency, such as “Don’t miss out,” or created feelings of appreciation, such as “Thanks for being a customer, here’s a reward,” Sanders said.

Part of Citi’s success can be attribut-ed to its willingness to experiment and learn from the things it assumed might not work. As Sanders put it, “The results speak for themselves.” –Elyse Dupré

Technology has been growing expo-nentially for many years now. Consumer options are directly tied to this growth. Marketers have been intensely focused on keeping pace with new channels and technology, and this focus has been a crucial element in the rise of the marketing technologist. However, when it comes to innovating in this new role, the key to success lies in the consumer, not necessarily the technology.

“We are in a world that is massively disrupted by the evolution of technol-ogy,” Mayur Gupta, Kimberly-Clark’s head of marketing technology and inno-vation, said during a Q&A session with Direct Marketing News Senior Editor Al Urbanski at the 2015 Marketing&Tech Innovation Summit. “The challenge we have is we’re massively influenced by tech, and are channel-focused. It’s easy to talk about mobile or social. We aren’t talking about consumers. Everything is funneling to one goal; how to inspire consumer behavior change.” Though consumers have always been the cen-tral focus in successful marketing, the power technology has granted them has led to unprecedented autonomy. “Consumers have a choice now. Every-thing used to be push-based, but now she’s pulling. If we want to win this race we have to be as fast, or faster than, consumers,” Gupta said.

Gupta said that’s where the role of a chief marketing technologist comes into play. He said that technology should drive seamless customer expe-riences. And frictionless experiences, he explained, will have a major positive impact on the bottom line. “As a mar-keter you don’t have to learn to build this tech. You have to know how to ap-ply it,” Gupta said. “We haven’t figured

out how to connect all of this tech to address consumer concerns yet.”

The main barrier to influencing con-sumer behavior with technology remains the siloed nature of many businesses. “Everyone needs to feel accountable with driving omnichannel customer ex-periences. It can’t just be the CMO,”

Gupta said. “[Marketing tech innovation] is the intersection of marketing and sales, marketing and customer service. It’s not just marketing and tech. The only way to drive that is when you converge all of these isolated functions.” Remedies for this pervasive lack of interdepartmental integration have been hard to come by, but solutions start with education and

cultivating a company culture conducive to the development of multidisciplinary personnel. “It’s not just how you teach, but actually enabling [employees] to per-form their daily duties using tech,” Gupta said. Some of this burden lies with the academic systems, according to Gupta. Once marketing educators begin expos-ing their students to tech-oriented ex-periences, there will inevitably be more of these marketing tech “unicorns”—marketers who embrace technological solutions in their overarching marketing strategies. This won’t be an overnight change, of course.

At Kimberly-Clark, marketers par-ticipate in an internal tech boot camp, of sorts. “How can you expect to meet your customers on Twitter or Facebook when you don’t understand the plat-forms yourself?” Gupta asked.

“Consumer expectations are soar-ing high. The only way to reach them is when we break these silos,” Gupta said. “In the next five years if we still have this isolated layer of marketing and tech, we will have lost the battle. Every marketer should be a technologist should be an analyst. It’s top down. It’s the mind-set, the culture.”

In his closing comments, Gup-ta said that today’s emerging chief marketing technologists should un-derstand that tech is a double-edged sword. On one side, technology gives increasing power to consumers. “Through choice and voice, consum-ers are no longer pushed. Now it’s the customer who’s pulling the market,” Gupta said. “But for us [as marketers], data that’s processed with technology makes content smarter. The combina-tion of data and tech—that’s when the magic happens.”

CONSUMERS ARE THE CENTER OF THE TECHNOLOGY STORMMayur Gupta dishes on why customers are the key to marketing and tech innovation. By Perry Simpson

Embracing and adopting new technology was a presiding theme at this year’s Mar-keting&Tech Innovation Summit. However, it seems that as marketers’ technologi-cal options grow, their practical choices shrink. This was one of the key takeaways from a panel at the event, which featured Scott Brinker, cofounder and CTO at ION Interactive; Bhavesh Vaghela, CMO at Re-sponse Tap; David Hahn, SVP of product management at Integral Ad Science; and Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, CEO of AirPR, as the moderator.

When asked how marketers should determine whether a new piece of tech is worth adopting, Brinker opined that, in a perfect world, marketers’ strategies should determine what tech they use. However, he acknowledged that the opposite is often true. “I think the better way to think of this is a little more cir-cular. There’s so much innovation com-ing out of this space right now,” Brinker said. “You don’t want this [innovation]

to drive your strategy per se, but you should keep an eye on how some of this innovation is opening up for potential change in your strategy.”

“We’re seeing a dramatic shift in the way marketers are actually reaching people,” Hahn added. “With a fragment-ed supply chain, and a much broader way of reaching the people you’re trying to market to, you won’t have the capaci-ty to [reach people] without technology.” This, of course, begged the question of whether marketers should seek all-in-one tech solutions, or explore different tech options for each individual need.

“Tech is never really the limiting factor. It comes down to marketers’ talent with the tech they have,” Brinker opined. “The whole thing with buying a whole suite, or assembling a stack of tech options is re-ally the wrong [approach]. We should be focused on how we can actually execute these customer experiences.”

Indeed, the panel seemed in agreement

that updating company culture and focus-ing on the customer should take prece-dent over updating tech. “The reality is most marketing teams don’t even use a tenth of the technology they have. They’re buying tech because it’s the coolest thing in town,” Response Tap’s Vaghela said. “You’ve probably got all of the data sets you need. What you need to do is connect it up, and then start using that data to help customers through their journey.” Echoing an earlier Q&A session with Mayur Gupta, Vaghela added that a company culture that em-braces tech from the top down, while focusing on the customer, is pivotal to success in today’s rapidly expanding digital environment.

“If we believe that we’re in the age of the customer, and we believe that cus-tomers have this power of engaging with us in multiple ways, then we really need to understand how we stitch these [cus-tomer] journeys together,” Vaghela said.

DEMYSTIFYING MARKETING TECHPanelists discussed the role technology plays in marketing, and how marketers should ap-proach new technology at the 2015 Marketing&Tech Innovation Summit. By Perry Simpson

A survey of 475 chief marketers from around the world conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that 80% will not be able to keep paces with the increased demands of consumers and technology without dramatic chang-es being made in their organizations.

Chief among the changes they’d like to see is a new visualization at head-quarters of the marketing function as a revenue generator rather than a cost center. The world’s marketers, for good or ill, were confident that the keys to the kingdom will be handed to them with-in the next five years. Three quarters

of them said that senior management would award them primary responsibili-ty for experience by that time.

“That ownership puts marketing right at the center of revenue generation and setting the company strategy,” said San-jay Dholakia, CMO of marketing automa-tion provider Marketo, which sponsored the Economist survey. “The transforma-tion taking place will be profound as mar-keters race to adopt technology and add skills that will allow them to manage the entire relationship with the customer.”

Other key findings of the survey:• Two thirds of CMOs said senior

management still viewed marketing as a cost center.

• Barely half of those surveyed said they use data to gain insights and en-gage with customers today. Eighty-one percent said they would do so within three to five years.

• More than 60% agreed that cus-tomer engagement manifests itself in re-newals, retention, and repeat purchases.

• More than half were of the opinion that the Internet of Things and real-time, personalized mobile communications would revolutionize the practice of mar-keting by 2020.

FOUR OF FIVE CMOS UNABLE TO KEEP UP WITH TECH DEMANDSFor the situation to improve, marketing must be reconceived as a revenue generator and it must be put in charge of customer experience, says a study. By Al Urbanski

Having a formal roadmap for the acqui-sition, integration, and data unification of digital marketing technology could lead to improved business and marketing performance, according to a study.

“Quantify How Well You Unify,” pub-lished by the CMO Council and Tealium, gauges how much of a hold chief market-ers have on their digital marketing strate-gies and to what degree they’re unifying and extracting value from multiple custom-er data sources. Some findings include:• Forty-two percent of CMOs who own their marketing tech strategy have a stronger business impact than CMOs who delegate that power.• CMOs with a formal strategy con-tribute more overall revenue and value creation. Half are able to attain more targeted, efficient, and relevant cus-tomer engagements, and 39% achieve greater return and accountability of marketing spend.• CMOs who manage and integrate technology achieve measurable business

and operational gains. Thirty percent of CMOs who manage and integrate technology extremely or pretty well see tangible business value. In fact, 51% of this group achieves greater revenue contributions.• CMOs who integrate their technolo-gy strategy as part of their overall mar-keting plan achieve more personalized customer interactions across channels. Consider the following: 59% of CMOs who boast this strategy report achiev-ing more targeted, efficient, and relevant customer engagements.

As the research shows, there’s an in-herent need for master planning when it comes to gathering and analyzing cus-tomer-centric data from multiple interac-tive and self-help channels. To wit:• Forty-four percent of senior marketers surveyed have a formal marketing tech strategy and program to further their business goals.• Only 16% of marketers consider their marketing tech strategy to be tightly

aligned with their business strategy.• Just 3% of marketers say that they’re do-ing extremely well with regards to integrating marketing technologies across functions.• Fifty-four percent of marketers aren’t sure whether their marketing tech in-vestments are producing tangible busi-ness value.

Although technology is an essential part of the modern marketing strategy, the rapid increase of its options is wreak-ing havoc. The reasoning? Applications and customer data are more fragment-ed than ever, according to the study.

“While 67 percent of survey respon-dents believe new marketing technolo-gies are essential or very important to overall marketing group performance and effectiveness, they are being held back by technology overload, too many data sources, and lack of strategic ap-plication and integration of disparate point solutions and data,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the of the CMO Council.

MARKETING TECHNOL-OGY IS IMPERATIVE TO CMOs’ SUCCESSHaving a formal roadmap for the acquisition, integration, and data unification of digital mar-keting technology could lead to improved business and marketing performance, according to a study. By Andrew Corselli