Marketing technology and operations is the heartbeat of modern marketing. And there’s no event better than MarTech to plug you into the ground truth of how that discipline is evolving.
Our next MarTech is now just 10 days away, April 23-25 in San Jose. I’m incredibly excited by everything that’s come together for this conference — it will be our best one yet.
Here are the top 10 things I’m looking forward to:
#1. Release of the 2018 marketing technology landscape.
We’ll unveil the latest marketing technology landscape graphic in our first morning keynote. Do you think the martech vendor space has grown or shrunk? I won’t give it away, but as a spoiler alert, I’ve had to enlist the help of Anand Thaker and his team at IntelliPhi for months of data research and Jeff Eckman and his team at Blue Green Brands for the visualization this year. Some surprising insights here that you can be the first to learn.
But how are real companies harnessing all this innovation? That rolls us into…
#2. Presenting The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards.
We had 54 contributors to this year’s Stackies, including companies such as Airstream, BlackRock, Cisco, Earth Networks, Frontline Education, Janus Henderson, Juniper Networks, Merkle, Morningstar, Stantec, Tennant, ThermoFisher Scientific, Thor Industries, and more.
You can be the first to get access to all of them and join us in celebrating the winners, who will be announced during the first morning keynote. We’ll also make our donation to Girls in Tech for $5,400 — a $100 for every entry. (Thank you to all who contributed!)
#3. New keynote panel on “Democratizing Martech.”
I think one of the most transformational — yet under-appreciated — revolutions happening in marketing is the explosion of “citizen technology”: software to empower citizen developers, citizen integrators, citizen analysts and data scientists.
We’ll dig into this phenomenon, what it means and how to leverage it, with four leaders from some of the hottest companies in this space: Elissa Fink, CMO of Tableau; Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, Andrew Ofstad, Co-founder, Product of Airtable; and Linden Tibbets, CEO of IFTTT.
It’s not just your marketing organization that’s increasingly in the position to harness these technologies. It’s your customers — even consumers — too.
#4. Five other high-impact keynotes, from real-world AI to martech security.
Anand Thaker of IntelliPhi will help me kick things off with a look at the state of the marketing technology landscape.
Madeline Delianides, who has led marketing technology transformation at companies such American Express, Oppenheimer, and The New York Times will have a candid fireside chat on how to drive change in a complex marketing environment.
Holly Rollo and I will then dig into the disruptions happening in marketing with privacy and security — and how you can turn this to your advantage as a modern marketing leader.
The next day, Adelyn Zhou, the CMO of TOPBOTS and author of Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders with open up the day with a keynote on Separating Fact from Fiction in Marketing AI.
She’ll be followed by Jason Heller, Partner and Global Lead Digital Marketing Operations and Technology at McKinsey & Company, who will continue top build on that theme with Beyond the Hype: Harnessing the Real Power of Unified Data and AI, drawing upon his experience helping dozens of the world’s leading brands.
If you want the no-BS view of the state-of-the-art of marketing and AI, these two keynotes are can’t-miss. (Not that you’re going to want to miss any of the others either.)
#5. Five amazing 1/2-day workshops: martech, CX, CDP, agile, GDPR.
This is our first time doing optional 1/2-day workshops before the opening of the rest of the conference, and we’ve got five amazing ones run by some of the best leaders in the martech industry:
- Using CDP to Make the Most of Your Customer Data with David Raab (SOLD OUT)
- Creating Connected Experiences with Jeff Cram (SOLD OUT)
- The Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology with Tony Byrne
- Agile Marketing Advantage with Andrea Fryrear
- GDPR: Tackling Consent and Marketing Compliance in Practice
There are still a few spots left in those last three, but probably not for long.
#6. Great discussions with old friends and colleagues — and new ones.
I’m an introvert. So other things being equal, I’m usually not rushing to hang out with crowds of other people. (The irony of me chairing a conference is not lost on me.)
However, I genuinely look forward to the 3 days I get to spend talking with people at MarTech. Because an incredible benefit of having so many professionals in this field come together to learn in one physical location is the number of really interesting discussions that happen serendipitously over coffee, or lunch, or a glass of wine in the evening.
Marketing is an industry in the middle of phenomenal change, and there’s so much to learn through informal conversations with peers. Even a handful of new connections can pay tremendous dividends in expanding your support network and opening up new career opportunities. These meaningful conversations are perfect for introverts like me.
(And, hey, if you’re an extrovert, wow, you can amp that up 10X.)
#7. 100 leading marketing technology exhibitors and sponsors
There is a tremendous amount of innovation happening in marketing technology, and there’s no better way to get an overview of the breadth and depth of new possibilities by seeing many of these technologies in action, all in one location on a level playing field.
We’ll have around 100 marketing technology exhibitors and sponsors at MarTech. In a relatively short period of time, you can expand your familiarity with the state-of-the-art solutions from across the entire spectrum of marketing technology.
#8. An incredible Marketing Track of 8 in-depth sessions.
But what makes MarTech unique is that, while we have an amazing set of vendors at the event, they don’t control the editorial tracks. MarTech is a vendor-agnostic conference with no other agenda than to provide attendees with real-world, hype-free knowledge sharing among brand practitioners and independent industry experts.
For instance, on the Marketing Track at MarTech, you’ll hear:
- How VMWare measures marketing’s B2B impact, shared by their CMO
- How Airbnb and Evernote manage product-led vs. sales-led marketing
- How L’Oréal is innovating conversation marketing with chats by their CDO
- How RedHat uses marketing technology to decide the “next best action” for prospects
- How T-Mobile and MOD Pizza bridge digital and physical world marketing
- How DonorsChoose.org builds, analyzes and activates their digital community
- How Visier systematically manages GDPR and other martech legal hurdles
- How Medtronic is transforming customer lifecycles with account-based marketing
#9. An incredible Technology Track of 8 in-depth sessions.
Our Technology Track isn’t about theoretical or bleeding-edge technologies. It’s focused on what’s actually available today to give your company a competitive edge in a digital world:
- How Aenta has turned a set of disconnected tools into a digital marketing ecosystem
- How blockchain technologies are changing adtech and martech — for real
- How Intuit thinks about martech consolidation and diversification
- How Epsilon is harnessing computer vision in customer experience
- How the state of customer data platforms (CDPs) are evolving
- How Turner and Verizon distinguish true insights from “fake” ones in social media
- How HashiCorp and Redpoint Ventures see the rise of the go-to-market stack
- How martech leaders like CabinetM, LogMeIn, Bedrock Data, and Openprise manage their own marketing technology stacks
#10. An incredible Management Track of 8 in-depth sessions.
(You’re seeing a pattern with these last three things I’m looking forward to, no?)
One of the other things that really distinguishes MarTech is that we believe innovation in management is just as important as creative marketing and breakthrough technologies to thrive in the digital world.
Our Management Track will lean into that with these in-depth sessions:
- How Looker’s CMO leads a data-driven marketing team
- How to thing about platform dynamics in your own business model
- How Reduxio innovates with a small, globally distributed marketing team
- How Intel and The New York Times manage marketing innovation pragmatically
- How City National Bank create a roadmap for their marketing technology office
- How Alert Logic implemented an organization-wide attribution model with martech
- How WeightWatchers enabled marketers with self-service martech platforms
- How Palo Alto Networks’ marketing ops team ended up winning awards from their finance department
Last chance to make it to this MarTech!
You’ve got one more week to get a ticket to MarTech — whether you’re joining us for the all-access program, participating in a workshop, or just stopping in for a day at our expo hall and some of the amazing presentations we’ll have in a sponsored track and our Discover MarTech Theater.
See you there!
Quite a good read; i think the Martech vendor space has grown significantly