Dentsu

1.What are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the MarTech space lately?

First thing that is impacting Martech is the “Name dropping” mindset. It’s a great word coined and here to stay, and many industry practitioners use it loosely without knowing the ramification.

Mindset of marketers and agencies treating Martech as an innovation in media and thinking every new platform in town is like a "new media innovation that can win awards" is the endemic we are fighting.

They mostly fail to consider Martech at its core is about process, technology, and planning, and that it creates lot of tech/data debt for every platform they try (or "innovate"), and that debt will be very expensive in the long run if not planned.

With regards to data discipline maintained by advertisers. I would like to drive home three points :

ð Data points are too siloed and dispersed: The first challenge is getting all that data into one place to drive data insights. Most companies with their strict data policy aren’t allowing this to happen, so if we were to suggest a solution like creating CDP for instance, it will remain a wishful thinking.

ð Figuring out how to collect quality First Party Data: in last 18 months, I have been experiencing several workstream and data driven brainstorming sessions – but when we finish the process we don’t get the desirable outcome and still remain in a blurry state about the exercise and go back to our drawing board … (as you’ve witnessed yourself, even the so-called workshop at Nestle failed to address this)

ð Integration à Many want to deliver an exceptional experience, but one needs to have the technology stack integrated not only within marketing, which is critical, but across marketing, commerce (and for non-tech companies, retail), and service.

2. What keeps you up at night when it comes to some of the major predicaments in the MarTech space?

How the cookie less era drags down campaign performance and yet, the mission to fully utilize 1st party data goes too slowly

As one of the agency specialist practice leader, my predicament is always about talent management, managing evolving nature of skillsets for strategy planning, technology delivery & project management for MarTech that needs to be built internally at the pace that is needed. This would require us to: 1) upskill our internal workforce at pace that we have not done till date; 2) attract and hire talent differently that agency business is used to 3) Have an ecosystem where the diverse talent with this skillset fit and collaborate to contribute in the regular business conversations.

3. Can you tell us about the latest project that you have been working on and what are some of the technological and process elements that you leveraged to make the project successful?

With Google for one of the telco giant and an FMCG in Indo, we came up with this Audience Strategy and 1P Data Activation workshop whose progress will be monthly updated until we get to cohesively leverage 1st party data for predictive marketing.

We do have a telco client who is onboarded to this, but unfortunately cannot share this in open forum

“Mindset Of Marketers And Agencies Treating Martech As An Innovation In Media And Thinking Every New Platform In Town Is Like A "New Media Innovation That Can Win Awards" Is The Endemic We Are Fighting”

Which are some of the technological trends which excite you for the future of the MarTech space?

To me, it’s chatbot boom that drives conversational commerce. We’re partnering with Message Bird, an omnichannel communication platform that drives push notifications and chatbot, whose features put great emphasis on how automatic messaging can help drive better resonance with audiences and is a pivotal element of CXM. Learn more about them from the attached deck.

The other one is how we’re evolving from precision to predictive marketing. Learn more about it from the aforementioned XL Workshop deck.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation that Martech will bring into the business of advertising and communication is really exciting, and it changes the fundamentals of how we as agencies do business. Read and could highlight some stuff like the Copy AI - https://xenoss.io/blog/artificialintelligence-in-marketing

4. How can budding and evolving companies reach you for suggestions to streamline their business?

The key is 360 automation from data collecting and analyzing to activating and visualizing. The platonic ideal of this premise is to build a CDP in my opinion. PFA a deck that fleshes out why CDP matters.