Navigating Marketing Technology: Insights from Gartner's Ben Bloom (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I'm Ben Bloom. I'm a research director at Gartner. I've been an agency strategist. I've been a brand side digital marketer, as well as a consultant on the vendor side, and I really enjoy bringing that perspective to my clients at Gartner. When a marketer is looking for a solution for a particular technology need, we can talk about, you know, what's creating that need? How are you going to measure success that's associated with deploying that technology? What are some of the vendors to consider? And because we talk to those vendors, we both evaluate them for published research, as well as, you know, learn on a periodic basis about their new offerings. We're usually in a position to say, well, that they might be good at X or Y or Z, but if you're looking for J, K, L, and M, those are use cases that are better supported by another vendor. So it's nice to help marketers to really find the technology that's right for them, as opposed to just buying the brand name technology that everyone's heard of. So one client that that we've worked with has, you know, a variety of different kind of investments into various marketing clouds, and that's something that is pretty common as it relates to organizations that have maybe been acquired, where you have brand A that grew and bought up some of its competitors, and now you have multiple components of solutions that belong to kind of different vendor families. And that can be challenging from a vendor management standpoint, because each of the vendors is going to kind of promise that they can outdo the other. And in addition to helping to normalize that, we've also been able to help them to advance their marketing maturity. One of the things we found in our research at Gartner is that in 2015, we asked marketers how good they thought they would be at delivering real-time event-triggered marketing. And then we did the same survey in 2017, and the marketers who answered about their current level of maturity in 2017, we found that they had dramatically underachieved where they thought they would be in 2017, when they were asked a few years ago. And when you think about the real-world implications of that, that's a situation where marketers are having more trouble than they would have thought in getting to this level of data-driven marketing in real time. So we've been able to help our clients to normalize their efforts and say, okay, we can take a step back. We're not failing at this, it just is really hard. So we've been able to help marketers to establish that they might have some overlapping technology solutions to try to eliminate or identify superior solutions. And then now they're in the process of rationalizing that, so there might be some contracts they'll let lapse, as well as some new skills that they'll bring in-house.