A Grand View of Marketing Technology

A Grand View of Marketing Technology

Content. Code. Corporate.
The creative. The nerd. The suit.
Three different disciplines.
Three different domains.
Three different clichés.

Divided by decades of conceptual and cultural barriers, these tribes have been entrenched in their separate identities.

Digital transformation, the disruptor of so many things, is disrupting that taxonomy, too. Because in a world of intensifying global competition, accelerating technological change, and rising customer expectations, that old model of three separate disciplines fails to innovate across them. Yet that is where the most transformative possibilities await.

There were marketing conferences, which technologists didn’t attend.
Tech conferences, which marketers didn’t attend. And management, as a discipline, was rarely discussed at either. These silos sufficed. Until they didn’t.

A new, unified model is emerging to unlock that potential.

1

The narrow view of martech — marketing technology — is that it’s the intersection of these
disciplines. A Venn diagram, where three giant circles overlap, but just a little.
Through that lens, marketing technologists are a small but growing group of hybrid professionals who
manage that intersection. They build both brands and systems. They span marketing and IT, bridging those two silos. But still those departments remain rooted on opposite sides of an organizational chasm.

In the grand view, these once
separate disciplines are increasingly
inseparable. The three circles of
the Venn diagram overlap almost
completely.
Marketers embrace technology
to deliver compelling campaigns and
remarkable customer experiences.
Technologists embrace user experience
design and growth hacking principles
to create products that people love
and love to share. Management
synthesizes the myriad of elements
across them into a cohesive whole,
greater than the sum of its parts.

That narrow view of martech is, as
a software analogy, a patch for a
program that is woefully outdated.
It’s a bug fix for WordStar in an age
of Google Docs.
The grand view of martech is much
bigger than that.

2

The boundaries blur, and that’s a good thing.
It brings the customer into focus.

3

THE ART OF
MANAGEMENT FOR
OUR DIGITAL AGE

4

Managers embrace distributed
leadership, giving teams the power
to sense and respond to a rapidly
changing world. Strategy becomes
more bi-directional, a shared vision
that adapts to emergent opportunities
through continuous experimentation.
The brand ideal is made real, and
relevant, every day.

Tuning the people-process-technology
triangle is the art of management for
our digital age, and it’s more malleable
than ever before. Imagination is its
greatest resource.
This enlightened model of management
is owned by everyone. It’s less top-down
and more of a living network, swift to
evolve in a disruptive environment.
It is agile in spirit and practice.

Because martech isn’t just
technology. It’s the people and
processes that leverage technology
in the pursuit of that brand ideal.

5

In the grand view, everyone who
affects a customer’s experience is —
in some proportion — a marketer,
a technologist, and a manager.
In martech, they are a united
tribe, but not a homogenous one.
Individuals still bring different talents,
experiences, and specialities, and
there’s great strength in that diversity.
But the martech tribe holds more in
common than the three independent
disciplines from which it arose. Its
core belief is that these are now
interdependent aspects of the same
merged mission: the design and
development of extraordinary
experiences.
Their bonds are greater than their
boundaries.

6

In the grand view, martech is the
new marketing, the new IT, and the
new customer-centric management.
It creates, connects, and collaborates
across all of these domains. Above all,
it embraces learning beyond labels.
Marketing, technology, and management
were silos of the past.

Marketing technology management — martech —
is the fabric of the future.

7

This grand view expresses our guiding vision
for The MarTech conference.
®

We seek to cross-pollinate the best ideas and latest innovations across
marketing, technology, and management. But more importantly, we
strive to reveal the beautiful entanglements between them.
MarTech is a marketing conference for technologists and a tech
conference for marketers. Management, as a discipline, is an
integral and essential part of the program.
®

Not every organization is ready for marketing, technology, and
management to converge. But our goal is to enable the present and
future leaders who recognize the synergies between these disciplines
to drive change and demonstrate the power of a united martech tribe.

We hope you’ll join us.