19MAY 2021As a non-technical technical leader who has spent most of his career straddling business and technology teams, I have seen marketing technology significantly change over the years. During my career, I've led the redesigns/refreshes (at the enterprise, medium-sized business, and small businesses) of more than 50 major brand/product websites; I've led digital departments and worked as a management consultant. But the two words I would use to sum up the evolution of marketing technologies revolve around speed and specialization. Furthermore, it's important to understand how these terms, speed/specialization, are either effective or efficient or both. To be effective, the effort needs to impact the bottom line. To be efficient means, it reduces friction in the overall process. I would argue you always want to be effective, sometimes being efficient gets you there but not always. (NOTE: When I use the word technology, I include resources such as people because their skillsets are the ultimate tools to get work done.)When I started in digital around 20 years ago (it was called interactive marketing), there was a lack of sophistication. Initially, we were marketing people who went into digital from print and recreated the offline online. This is because the industry was so new; it was unclear what you needed to know on the web. We strove for consistency. We leveraged pretty pictures, clever copy, buying domain names that seemed relevant. As new web technologies appeared, we would adopt them, whether it was flashing banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, or even keyword stuffing to maximize keyword density. We thought we were quick, but we had extensive internal checkpoints to clear for business approval, and once approved, they went into the development queue that was always strained. The marketing team, at this point, was not very specialized in terms of digital skillsets.EVOLUTION OF MARTECH AMID THE PANDEMICBy Michael Goldrich, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Club Quarters HotelsCXO INSIGHTS
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