MarTech East 2019 Recap: Peak CDP, Point Solutions, and Privacy

In today's episode, we are recapping the uh Martec East Conference uh that uh I had a chance to speak at this week along with uh CEO Katie Robert. We did a three-hour workshop on attribution and then uh two days of conference talks. So let's take a look at what the major themes were this year. Martec has always been and and still is mostly about marketing operations. It's still the major focus, and that's a great thing because that's uh an area where marketing tends to be very deficient.

One of the interesting things that was running through attendees' minds, it was certainly a major topic at both mornings' breakfasts, was that buy versus build is still largely the focus. People are talking about normalizing their Martech stack and you know adding tools in gaps and stuff. And it's astonishing to me that the first impulse of a marketing operations person or uh chief marketing officer is something's not working, let's buy some more stuff. That's a reason why uh Scott Brinker's Martec Lumiscape, that huge landscape with all those logos, 8,000 of them. There's a reason why there's 8,000 logos, if that's the mindset people are in of let's just buy more stuff to see if that fixed the problem.

It doesn't. But I thought that was interesting in the number of conversations I had with uh attendees. Their instinct is let's buy more stuff to try and fix the problems. I remember uh sitting at breakfast uh the second day listening to this person talk about how they they felt like their stack was incomplete and they needed some additional lead scoring technologies and they needed um some new uh uh regularization technologies and something to uh deal with uh synchronization. And I said, So what do you have in-house for your stack?

They said, well, the major components are uh web analytics from Google, uh Eliqua, uh Salesforce.com, an ERP system, and then they listed like 15 other tools. I'm like, you know that the 10 other tools that you you listed, they are duplicative of the some of the capabilities in the core platforms that you already own. They're like, no, that I I didn't know that. So well, I feel like there's some more juice you could squeeze out of the things you're already paying for uh before you go buy something new. Now that's not to say you don't ever need to buy something new, sometimes you absolutely do, and you need a point solution that provides a service or a function that just can't get anywhere else.

That's a great uh opportunity to look at a point solution. But if you're paying, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars every month for these major platforms, it's worth a deep dive into the manual to see what's in there. So that was one of the big the major takeaways for me. Second, we are at peak CDP. Um customer data platforms.

These are services that promise to uh extract and unify all your customer data, give you, you know, 360 degree one view of the customer and all that stuff. And everybody and their cousin says they're a CDP now. Uh you know, former uh data management platforms, etc. Everybody, even tag management software is now claiming to be a CDP. CDPs have a problem, and the problem is this they are a band-aid on poor process um governance and poor discipline when it comes to technology.

If you need a third-party piece of software to unify all of your data, it means that you do not have a good handle on your data. There are many, many really good database services, data extraction services, etc. Um, that can perform the functions of a CDP, but allow you to own your data rather than have a third-party vendor managing it for you. And in a lot of cases, the CDP is uh it is a band-aid because, and it's an expensive band-aid, uh, because if you can't find where all your data is and match it up, yes, a piece of software can do that, but you should be already doing that. You should already have good identifiers, um, normalized identifiers throughout your data.

So that's one aspect I thought was interesting. The second was that um privacy issues are on everyone's radar, which is great. GDPR still not being followed well by a lot of companies, um, and then CCPA and like 13 of its variants also uh looming large on people's minds. And I went through the expo hall and talked to about half a dozen CDP vendors, and I asked them, how does your product help a marketer deal with these issues? And they said, Well, our we all our software all has these features that allow you to input the privacy policies of your choice, and you know, and then you configure it and then you set it, and then it will obey what you tell it to do.

I said that's not helpful because if you are not familiar with the law already, uh you may misimplement or just not implement privacy features. And so the another point of contention with I have with these uh vendors is you're not making people's lives easier by automatically suggesting, hey, this field looks like an identifying field, you should anonymize it. Um, so that you are in compliance with the law. Um, there is a lot of work to be done by a lot of vendors. Um, I heard one uh vendor say, Well, we're we're GDPR compliant, so we're automatically CCPA compliant.

I'm like, nope, that's not how that works. Uh the laws are different, they are different enough that you do need to uh merge the different pieces and identify what sort of the strictest, highest standard of compliance is that will automatically make you compliant for both, but you have to merge those features together in order to get to that. Simple example GDPR is at the individual level, CCPA is at the household level, and so your default for privacy has to be at the household level if you want one policy to rule them all. Third point, um AI. Still poorly understood by a lot of people, but more companies are trying.

I did hear a number of people saying that they were doing pilot deployments and things like that, and seeing some good initial results. Um I saw one person from a pharmaceutical company talking about their uh data science and AI efforts mostly on conversion rate optimization. They were able to get 30% lift in about six months once they got all their their data untangled and such. So that was a great thing. I see you.

Glad to see that there's progress being made there. And finally, I can't believe we're still talking about attribution. Uh, not that it isn't important because it is, but that more companies have not made good progress on building their attribution models. Katie and I did a uh workshop, and it was uh a wide, wild mix of people from people who are like, Yep, we have uh a functional multi-touch attribution model informed by machine learning to we don't have anything yet. And it's shocking to me that you know, really almost a decade after multi-touch attribution models really started hitting the market, that we're still at a point where it's not commonplace, at least on the digital side, at least on the digital side, right?

I totally get merging offline and online is really difficult, and you need to have uh you do need to have data science and machine learning capabilities. But there is no reason not to be using multi-touch attribution, at least on digital uh in digital marketing because the data's there, uh, the click stream is largely intact, and it will at least point you in the right direction. So, those are some of the the major highlights from Martech East fantastic conference. Huge thanks to uh Scott Brinker and the Third Door Media Team for having me come out and do a workshop and speak. Um if you want to see the session, go to uh where can I get the slides.com uh or just go to the trust Insights uh website and you can uh watch the entire video from the session.

Uh, but again, huge thanks to those folks, and uh looking forward to participating in more uh Martech events. Uh as always, please leave your questions below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.