The use of data and technology in marketing has ushered in a new era for CMOs. The prime challenge is to keep pace with the fast-paced consumer behaviour and MarTech is turning out to be the perfect solution to make it happen in an effective way.
Speaking about the need to build robust platforms beyond the popular search engines and social media channels, Wendy Hogan, Marketing Transformation & Strategy Director, Oracle stated, “I think what is important is that marketers think of the ways to leverage the base that they build. Having a huge fan base on a social networking platform is a good start but the question is: how do you turn that into your database? It can be limiting when you are operating entirely on social platforms as there are enormous opportunities beyond that.”
Underling the need for the use of marketing technology for the success of a brand in today’s age and times, Meera Iyer, Head Marketing, Big Basket, commented, “Marketers are using technology to make difficult processes easier and making something repetitive automated. Technology is increasingly coming to play in marketing to drive three things that marketers want to do—scale up, improve ROI and give insights.”
John Gallagher, IBM Global Head Performance & Programmatic Marketing believes that artificial intelligence will never be a substitute for human intelligence as far as the use of marketing technology is concerned. In his view, “AI augments in many ways the human being. It actually frees up the individual to bring their aspects of human intelligence to the benefit of the marketers. As far as India is concerned, it has a technological advantage and increasingly businesses here are adopting the use of AI to better understand their business targets and the trend is going to grow even more in the coming time.”
Speaking about how digital is witnessing aggressive growth and how India is emerging as the promising digital capital of the world, Pankaj Khushani, Head, Media Technology Solutions, SEA, India & Korea, Google, said, “Out of the 670 billion dollar advertising market, 210 billion dollars are already on digital. So people are increasingly realising the importance of Digital and in India, in the last 18 months, the growth of digital has been phenomenal. For example, there are 30 OTT players in India currently which is reminiscent of the Telco sort of revolution that took place in the country earlier which totally transformed businesses.”
Aloksdeep Singh, Head E-commerce, Titan, thinks that MarTech should be an integral part of the business agenda. He added, “MarTech is very important not just from a commerce perspective but for digital transformation to take place in the rue sense. It helps to connect the offline and the online. For any marketer or CMO, MarTech should be an important component of the business
agenda.”
(These are excerpts from discussions that took place at ad:tech 2017)
