David Raab has been following marketing technology and analytics as an expert and consultant for over two decades of fundamental technology-driven changes. Post Funnel sat with David to figure out whether technology is the problem or the solution, how it’s changing the roles of marketers, and is AI about to reshuffle marketing all over again.
How are marketers marketing differently today compared to 20 years ago?
“Well, the big difference is simply the number of channels to deal with. Smartphones are only ten years old, right? So the whole notion of mobile wasn’t even there ten years ago. Twenty years ago we were just beginning to deal with websites. Maybe getting sort of a little skilled with email.
“So web advertising was a very new thing back then. You had a very different and much simpler world to deal with, both in terms of channels and information. Web advertisement requires and brings in much more information than print advertisement, and the same is true for email vs. direct mail. And of course, once you start getting into things like mobile and website personalization, you have vastly more information about the people you’re dealing with. So you have that, and then you have more frequency for contact.
“So not only do you have more accounts that you’re touching more often in these channels, there’s just an exponential explosion in complexity, the number of decisions that marketers have to make, the number of different things they could do has grown in just a fantastic fashion.”
And this is where technology has to come into the picture because you just can’t handle that amount of data and that frequency of interactions without technology.
“Right. Well, the technology causes the problem in the first place, and it also — at least potentially – provides the cure because it does give you the power to make decisions in an automated fashion, which you could never make otherwise.
“And it also gives you, of course, the analytic capabilities to not just make decisions but to analyze what you’re doing and at least have hope of making the right decisions.”
So, technology creates opportunities and problems, and then other technologies solve the problems or at least some of them, and then there are new technologies, and we need new technologies to cater to that. We’re forever doomed to be on the chase for new technologies.
“I think for the foreseeable future the complexity will continue to rise. The thing that could change is artificial intelligence, when it reaches the point where it takes over and manages a lot of the complexity for you, and there is a strong case to be made that that’s happening.
“And then marketers won’t have to deal directly with so many decisions, and they will actually be able to get back to doing more traditional things, like worrying about branding and positioning and value propositions and all the stuff that we really signed up to do in the first place.”
So from your vantage point, where are we on the road to artificial intelligence really changing the marketing scene?
“Well, I’m an optimist, and I have to think that we’re closer than we may realize, than a lot of people realize.
“You see tools that can actually write and test headlines or even body copy and pick the right images and actually create the right offers and generally doing a lot things that we didn’t think computers would ever do for us. So that’s a huge area of productivity enhancement for marketers.
“Similarly, we’re really beginning to see some very interesting work in systems involving optimal campaign strategies, where the system tries different things, and tests and finds what works and what doesn’t work. Which is very different from the rule-based approach, which is what we had to do before artificial intelligence, where the marketer would kind of have a hypothesis then maybe test it, but you only test so much. Automated systems implicitly test hundreds of things, and not only that, but they can take different payouts with different people.
What do you consider to be the biggest challenges faced by customer marketers today?
“Well, certainly the complexity of it all. It’s an overarching problem that we have. Picking the right technologies — because there are just so many options, vastly more than you can even test. So one challenge is deciding what you’re even going to try to make work for you. In reality, we’re always going to have multiple systems. At best, you could hope that given the layer of the stack, the data layer and the decision layer, in particular, will be pretty unified. But even then, you’re going to have multiple tools to do specialized things, so you have to think about that.
“Measurement is another huge, huge challenge. And measurement is a funny thing, because actually we have so much data, the problem is we can’t necessarily measure the things that are really important to us.
“So it’s nice to know how many clicks and views and all the rest, and that’s something we can measure until the cows come home. But we don’t necessarily know how that relates to later behavior, to retention, to later purchases or whatever it is we really care about. Connecting the measures you have with the results that you really want to measure is really the grand challenge for measurement.”
What do you see as the biggest customer marketing trends today?
“Today? This minute? What’s hot right this second? Because it changes all the time. I mean, video has been very exciting. And short messages like Snapchat, I guess, is the hot thing of the moment, right? Social keeps growing and getting more complicated. Influencer marketing is a hot topic right now.
“On the technology side, artificial intelligence is really the grand thing. A lot of the really interesting work now has to do with video analysis. So say, it’s using artificial intelligence to look at a video and understand what’s going on. And chatbot technology, which has to do with voice recognition, but also language processing, and also with understanding intentionality, is much at the forefront right now.
“Then there’s virtual reality and augmented reality, which are also very interesting and definitely getting more real and more powerful. There was one augmented reality application that could basically project advertisements into the virtual realities in the AR space: there’s a billboard on the side of the building that you see and the ads change according to user data.”
Let’s talk a bit about the marketing stack. How do you see it shaping up today?
“So the notion of the marketing stack really was and is that you have an organized collection of tools that talk to each other in some systematic way. So at the bottom of the stack is always your data. Everything starts with data and everything feeds data in and reads data out.
“And then the next layer is your decisioning systems that take the data and analyze it and decide what to do. And then the highest layer of the stack is your delivery systems. Then there are many tools at every layer of the stack and hopefully they deal with each other efficiently in exchanging information back and forth. That’s one of the challenges, that the tools don’t always talk to each other.
“The other challenge is that there’s no one tool that absolutely does everything. SalesForce might claim to do that, but they don’t necessarily do. To have one vendor do everything is not even desirable. In reality, we’re always going to have multiple systems. The model that seems to be evolving is that you have a sort of a core platform or platforms that do have a lot of functionality and might look like a suite. But then, that’s still open to having specialized tools that kind of plug into it.”
What advice would you give marketers today to help them excel at their jobs?
“I would say my advice is try not to get distracted by all the bright and shiny objects out there. You know, focus on a few things, keep the customer in mind.
“Recognize that you can’t really do everything and rise to every challenge using every tool. Do core things well. You don’t have to do augmented reality right now. Just let that one go for a while. Do some other core stuff. That’s where you can get the best benefit.”