MarTech

The annual MarTech conference was held this week in San Francisco. I actually attended the first one years ago and it apparently continues to grow bigger and bigger each year. If you aren’t familiar with it, it focusses on the intersection of where marketing meets technology in this digital age. Scott Brinker, the founder of the conference coined the term Chief Marketing Technologist as a way to describe the direction a lot of marketing is going now between social media, marketing automation, e-commerce and content development. I recommend checking out his initial blog that was posted a few years ago located on the Harvard Business Review here.

Also, Scott has a blog that is a good one as well: http://chiefmartec.com

There were some interesting items that came out of the conference in the news, and while I was not able to attend, there were some good insights I wanted to pass along.

Shep Hyken passed along five lessons that came out from the conference. You can check them out here.

I think this was one of my favorite points of the article :

Hyekn focuses a lot about customer experience and it is definitely worth a read.

On the flip side of Marketing technology is the amount of platforms out there (and it continues to grow. This of course will likely lead to consolidation over time, but there is a lot of debate as to where marketing platforms are going.

Derek Walter notes in this article – that maybe all the marketing platforms are the main problem . In the article he begs the question, how do marketers navigate all these platforms and the noise that is out there in the industry and make the right choices to invest in.

This is Brinker’s latest assessment on all the tech out there. It’s a lot

This article by Sharon Goldman aligns with a lot of what Walter says, noting it is a real challenge for marketers to make it through all the hype out there. She

That said, there is a lot of positive things coming out of the conference, like how marketers are becoming more data driven and are being seen more as part of the company strategy vs. being the ad and events team,

What are your thoughts? Do you like the direction of marketing technology or find the landscape daunting?