Thoughts from Activate ‘23: The Rise of the Technical Marketer

Introduction

Last week, our team at Hightouch had the privilege of attending the 2023 Activate conference in San Francisco, an annual event hosted by Iterable, a leading communications platform, that brings together the best and brightest minds in digital marketing. Three days jam packed with content to help marketers raise the bar of modern customer experiences - plus some pretty awesome SaaS tee shirts.

As a longtime user of Iterable, I was ecstatic to once again return to the conference to learn about the latest trends and technologies driving customer engagement.

While I’ve come away impressed each year by the quality and depth of the content, this year however, entirely changed my perspective on how marketers are approaching their biggest personalization problems. Countless sessions and conversations highlighted just how fast marketing teams today are embracing a deep, technical understanding of their customer data. Equipped with these insights, they are now working right alongside their data teams to streamline getting it into the tools and platforms like Iterable to deliver better, more personalized campaigns.

There is a new generation of data-driven marketing teams, and with modern MarTech, they’re moving faster than ever before.

Modern MarTech is Supercharged by Customer Data

If you're in or around marketing technology, you've probably seen Scott Brinker's MarTech map highlighting the thousands of marketing technology platforms available today. Each logo on the map represents a company working to enable marketers to move faster and create more personalized customer experiences. There have never been so many solutions available - let alone anywhere near as high quality as we see today.

While each of the available MarTech platforms offers varying capabilities with vastly different user experiences, they are almost all entirely reliant on one fundamental ingredient to operate at their fullest potential; customer data.

With the right data available in modern MarTech, marketing teams today can leverage advanced capabilities and AI-powered features to unlock the hyper-personalized experiences expected by consumers. Does Spotify Wrapped ring a bell?

Driving Personalized Experiences with Data

At Activate, we had a chance to hear first-hand how marketing teams from leading organizations are unlocking the full potential of this modern MarTech. For example, Alex Holt, Vice President of Audience Strategy & Activation at Cars.com, gave a behind-the-scenes look into how the marketing team at Cars is enabled to access and activate any data point to Iterable to drive personalized marketing experiences.

By hydrating Iterable with user data like first name, activity data like recent shopping behaviors, and data created by their data science teams like propensity scores, the marketing team at Cars can hyper-personalize every consumer touchpoint.

Despite how complex this implementation may appear, Alex broke down just how easy it was for his team to get started. In a matter of five weeks, by implementing the proper workflows, technologies, and culture, his team was able to drastically reduce the time and resources it took to go from campaign idea to activation.

To achieve this, Alex and the team gave their data counterparts a straightforward task: store best-in-class customer data in a single, accessible place. The data team was free to decide how to gather, model, and store customer data in their data warehouse (Redshift), while the marketing team was able to decide on the tool they wanted to use to activate data, audiences and experiments out to their many marketing platforms like Iterable.

This new architecture, known as the Composable CDP, enables the data team to focus on what they do best while allowing the marketing team to activate data from a single, clean data store to Iterable where it is then referenced to deliver highly personalized marketing experiences.

An Evolving Marketer

While the Cars.com Composable CDP success story was not new news to me, what blew me away was the reaction and excitement from the rest of the attendees at Activate. Directly after the session, I kid you not; I had a marketer drag their data counterpart to our booth to see how they too, replace their manual pipeline(s) that sync data from Snowflake to Iterable - leaving me with one of my favorite quotes: "the data team has bigger things to worry about, and I just want to go fast".

This was just one example of many marketers who came over after the session wanting to dive in to see and better understand they, like Cars.com, could move quickly to get customer data and audiences from their data warehouse into Iterable to drive their own personalization use-cases.

As a former director of data products who left Red Ventures to help build a platform that enables marketers to do just that…. It was music to my ears.

These many discussions highlighted how today's marketing teams are more informed about where and how their data flows to each marketing destination. Conversations with lifecycle marketing teams have quickly swung from "my data team gives me CSVs" in years past to "my propensity models are stored in Snowflake alongside my customer events and attributes tables" - far faster than I ever expected.

Other sessions at Activate further confirmed how quickly marketing teams are embracing a better understanding of their data and driving business outcomes with those insights. For example, Fahad Zahid, Head of Brand and Digital Marketing for the PGA of America, shared how his marketing teams leverage their data to directly influence PGA's marketing strategy to move off-course golfers to green grass facilities. Another session by Robert Schroko, VP of CRM, Audience Data Strategy, and Analytics at A+E Networks, unpacked how incremental conversion data enables his team to run cross-channel experiments, expand their email program, triple their send volume, and build alliances with cross-functional teams to scale impact.

Sure, these marketing teams may not need to understand each individual transformation happening before their data is available in production tables in their data warehouse. Still, it's quite evident that they are working alongside their data counterparts to be more informed about where their data resides and how it can be sent down to the tools they use every day.

The Road Ahead

Everything about the marketing landscape is changing quickly: AI, privacy regulations, emerging technologies like the cloud data warehouse, rising customer expectations, and so much more. Each of these changes brings new challenges for marketers to overcome. However, after seeing the incredible innovation and resilience on display at Activate, I'm more confident than ever in marketers keeping pace.

By embracing an understanding of their customer data, working collaboratively with data team counterparts, and ensuring that their organization is enabled with modern marketing platforms like Hightouch and Iterable, marketers will put themselves and their organizations in a position to thrive as we head into the many changes that tomorrow brings.