Future-Proofing Your Marketing Technology Stack

Editor's Notes

• #11: Earliest marketing technology might have been cave paintings – this is apparently an ad for a barbeque restaurant, showing how fresh their meat is and how happy the kids are about going there. Archeologists disagree about whether they also had live music on Saturdays
• #12: Skip over the intervening millenia, to look at the past 30 years or so. What you see is very rapid change: the cutting edge technology in 1986 was direct mail, but an architecture built around that would have been totally obsolete 10 years later, when email was the hot new thing. Similarly, an architecture built on email would have been equally obsolete 10 years after that, when desktop Web sites the mainstay. Fast forward another 10 years, and the mantra is mobile first, not to mention social, local, programmatic, video, and all sorts of other cool things. My point is, I can’t tell you what will be hot in 2026, but I promise it will won’t be what’s hot today. So the challenge facing marketers is, how to plan in an environment of rapid and probably accelerating change.
• #13: In particular, it’s pretty clear that the old way of doing things won’t work. Traditionally, technology planning – and actually all corporate planning – relied on a waterfall approach, starting with business strategy and carefully working through to marketing programs, functional requirements, architecture, and system requirements.
• #14: That still sounds impeccably logical, but it assumes a stability in technology and marketing programs that no longer exists – if it ever did. Instead, marketers need a different approach that privileges flexibility above all else, because that’s the only way they can even hope to keep up with changes.
• #15: In a word, the key to this flexibility is modularity, by which I mean you should build your system from components that can be individually replaced without interrupting the operations of the whole. Another way to look at it is to think in terms of buying functions that are individually self-contained and integrate with other functions.
• #16: The key functions you want to look for include: Assembling unified customer data (many sources, multiple types and formats, identity association) Planning, budgeting, evaluation Build and manage content (across channels) Selecting customer treatments (across channels; must be separate from delivery) Marketing management Real time execution Message delivery
• #17: Here are more technical requirements Open APIs (most critical to connect different layers; maybe not essential at the edge) Flexible data model (clearly for the primary database, but realize that other systems will store data too – don’t need the same model if internal data isn’t exposed to other components) Real time execution (important throughout the stack; need everywhere even if only use sometimes) Cloud-based (maybe)
• #19: Integration first tech vision: simple, open standards; consistent data model Shared decision methods: common metrics, channel-independent goals Staff skills: more analytical than channel-expertise; open to machine intelligence; more use of agencies for channel skills Cross-department: need to look beyond departments; consider incentives and training Tech evaluation: include integration & impact on future flexibility in criteria; recognize that will always be buying; balance current gain vs future risk of obsolesence Change oriented mindset: see change as continuous and good, not infrequent and threatening; everything is temporary; no long-term best approach