Marketing technology, and cloud platforms in particular, was high on the agenda at the annual BMA conference in Chicago, with attendees and speakers alike seeking to separate vendor hype from practical realities. Joel Harrison reports
The BMA conference in Chicago at the end of May/beginning of June is without question one of the high points of the global B2B marketing calendar. It features a wealth of content and a stellar line-up of high-profile speakers, typically from global B2B brands, spread over three intense days.
However, one topic that in previous years (to my mind at least) has been conspicuously low on the agenda at BMA has been marketing technology. Not so for 2015, with the second day of the conference featuring no less than four sessions directly focused on this topic, plus additional ones on related topics such as growth hacking.
This focus on technology is not in the least out-of-place at the BMA conference – whether we like it or not, platforms such as marketing automation (MA) have become central to the lives and activities of B2B marketers in all sectors, and it’s only right and proper that the use of these platforms (and the value they deliver) receives proper scrutiny at this kind of forum.
The concept of the marketing cloud, meanwhile, is newer and consequently a little less well defined or understood by many observers. Despite this it is rapidly emerging as a hot topic as vendors ramp up the hype and conversation.
Look forward
Laura Ramos, VP and senior analyst at Forrester, and a regular presenter at the BMA Chicago event, kicked off the focus on technology on the morning of the second day with a provocative session on a fundamental shift in usage that her organisation has observed.
She claims marketing analytics is shifting from enabling retrospective justification or validation of marketing spend through ROI demonstrations, to provision of forecasts enabling marketers to tell the business in advance what revenue to expect. As Ramos herself put it: “Stop looking backwards and start looking forwards.”
This concept of forecasting is an exciting development for marketing, in my opinion, enabling marketers to get off the back foot (having to perennially justify their activities retrospectively) and get onto the front foot, helping them to engage with other business leaders on their own terms, and drive the corporate agenda forward. It may not necessarily be easy to achieve, but the implications are profound and transformational – for individuals, organisations and the profession as a whole.
Automation doesn’t mean robots
Hot on the heals of Ramos, consultant Yvonne Tocquigny’s presentation, entitled ‘The myth of marketing automation’, sought to focus on the practical implications of using these platforms, and highlight the keys to success.
The central myth Tocquigny sought to dispel was that MA demands any less input from marketers in terms of time or (more importantly) requires any less creativity for effective utilisation.
She compared MA with the arrival of other marketing-related technologies that were predicted to transform marketing and remove the requirement for creativity – in particular desktop publishing.
As she put it: “There’s nothing automatic about MA. A lot of brilliant marketers have made us believe this – that all we have to do is plug in our tools. But the truth is, marketers are more indispensible than ever. Even when MA is implemented properly, we still need human intuition and creativity to make it work properly. You can’t automate a great idea, or a message that gives people goose-bumps.”
However, as she also pointed out, marketers have to adapt their skills to reflect this new environment and requirement – something that some marketers are struggling to do. She says: “Those marketers who are not rushing forward to embrace it will lose.”
Since its arrival, MA has substantially tipped the balance of the art versus science argument in favour of the latter, and marketers themselves and the profession as a whole has done much to realign around this evolving consensus. It was interesting, therefore, to see someone directly, skilfully and compellingly unpick much of this logic, and rebalance the equation in favour of the creative dimension of marketing.
Cloud cover
The final of the day’s sessions focused on technology was called ‘Cloud games – catching fire’. It sought to separate the hype in discussions on cloud-based marketing platforms, from the reality, by pitting four of the leading marketing cloud vendors (Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce) against two senior client-side marketers – Mason Power, CMO at insurance company CGCS, and Carter Kersh, senior director of field and partner marketing at Juniper Networks. The session was sponsored by agency Stein IAS, who set the questions and invited the panelists, and chaired by myself.
With such a large number of commentators on the stage and a big topic to cover in a limited timeframe, the discussion was always going to be pretty fast-moving with limited potential for deep analysis. However, it was an interesting opportunity to compare different vendor perspectives, and compare their visions with reality.
Various overlapping definitions of a marketing cloud were proposed, mostly centring on the lack of local hosting requirements. However, one of the most interesting observations was that the marketing cloud is a ‘promise’ to provide all marketing functionality in a single place.
The client-side marketers were particularly warm to this definition, although Kersh was sceptical about whether or not the challenge of managing a portfolio of applications within the cloud was actually any easier than managing various non-cloud ‘on-point’ platforms. In other words, the cloud sounds great, but in reality, the advantages may not be as tangible as the vendors claim.
Power agreed, suggesting that in practical terms ‘marketing cloud’ simply meant ‘marketing suite’. How the platforms were accessed was less important than the fact that they were all provided by the same vendor, and had inbuilt, effective integration. The implication is that the title ‘cloud’ is a means of making something sound more sexy or cutting edge than it actually is, or at least needs to be.
The vendors countered by suggesting that the level of intelligence and data offered by these integrated platforms gives marketing the potential to step up a gear, and brands to leverage significant competitive advantage.
Forecasting is the future
Among many other points covered, the discussion did return to the notion of predictive analytics, proposed by Ramos of Forrester earlier. Both vendors and clients alike expressed significant interest, and vendors all stated it was central to their development plans going forward.
Kersh from Juniper said his organisation was already experimenting with predictive analytics, with positive results, although he pointed out that while it did have the potential to deliver significant advantages and put marketers onto the front foot, it also required them to be accountable to organisation-wide revenue figures as never before, creating a new kind of pressure.
The vendors all agreed that the pace of development of their marketing clouds would continue to accelerate, which will inevitably create new challenges for marketers in terms of how they use the platforms and understand this potential.
While there is undoubtedly much hype in the notion of the marketing cloud,
which isn’t always helpful, marketers have never been better served by technology, and the opportunity to use it in a transformational way has never been greater. Translating the hype into actionable strategies remains the challenge for users.
Finally, it will be interesting to see how the vendor landscape continues to evolve, and whether the four represented at BMA remain at the leading edge of marketing cloud technology in a year’s time – watch this space.
