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Marketing as a Service (MaaS): The next wave of disruption for marketing tech

May 18, 2014/in Marketing /by 3 Created

Marketing technology has seen a remarkable innovation boom over the past 10 years — so much so that the market now boasts over a thousand vendors that IDC organizes into more than 75 categories. IDC believes this structure is unsustainable and over the next three years the forces of consolidation will exert fundamental changes in the way large enterprises provision marketing infrastructure and from whom they provision it. The marketing technology market, like much of the IT industry, will move to a cloud based service model which IDC calls the “third platform.” As the illustration shows, more than 90% of the growth in the IT industry will come from this model.

For marketers, the third platform means the advent of Marketing as a Service (MaaS), which will have transformative affects for IT, IT services, and creative agencies. Key indicators that MaaS is on it way include:

Unsustainable complexity: Point solutions have come to market independently leaving it up to marketers to assemble them into rational infrastructures. This is a highly inefficient market model for buyers and sellers.
Transition to platforms: The consolidation of point solutions into platforms has already begun. Many noteworthy acquisitions have been made by major vendors such as Adobe, IBM, Oracle, salesforce.com, and SAP. However, this phase of market development will not last long as markets move rapidly from platforms to “… as a Service” models.
Digital and creative coming together:AdAge recently named IBM the number one global digital agency in the world. IBM is rapidly hiring from the agency world to build out its creative services. Adobe has deep and long standing technology partnerships with many top agencies. The agency world needs a value proposition that will allow them restore margins and regain strategic relevance.

MaaS includes the fundamental technology, IT services, and creative services that marketing needs in a bundled offering. Bringing these services together delivers significant value to CMOs who have two key sources of pain: On one hand, their agencies cannot effectively execute omnichannel campaigns nor deliver real time attribution reporting. On the other hand, technology has added a great deal of cost and complexity to their operating environments. MaaS enables them to outsource much of the technological complexity, pay for it out of their advertising budgets and get better integrated marketing services from their top agencies. For tech vendors it means gaining access to the advertising budget which dwarfs marketing IT spend by orders of magnitude. As a result, IDC expects this model to be a major route to market for marketing technology in the enterprise segment. It is therefore an urgent action item for tech vendors, system integrators, and agencies — partner now or lose a major channel.

For more information on this important trend please contact me at gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

Marketing automation enters the age of the platform: The integration theme threaded through Dreamforce as the company unveiled Salesforce 1, a platform for the Internet of Customers. Providing a quality digital customer experience requires the integration of applications, data, messaging channels, and delivery mechanisms (including mobile and machines). Like an orchestra playing a piece of music, a brand is more richly experienced by multiple instruments simultaneously. Orchestration is the key. If the oboe plays independently in this corner and the violin over there, you can imagine the discord – even if they all work from the same sheet music. Integration, platforms, and clouds are themes I've also heard from Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Adobe, IBM, Hubspot, and Microsoft. Most of these companies will fill in important platform gaps over the next few years to become winners (I think Salesforce will clearly be in this camp).

Why this matters: Marketing technology platforms will prod two big changes. Marketing will need to reorganize and become multi-channel and customer experience oriented. And although vendors playing nice together will be easier to do in the cloud than it was for on-premise software, CMOs will someday find it valuable to standardize on a platform (or "cloud"). Hopefully, they will have differentiated choices that optimize for different business models.

Growing importance of design: I was super impressed with the fireside chat between Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and Marc Benioff, Salesforce's CEO. I found Marissa's ideas on design most intriguing. It’s a topic you don't hear much about in business circles, yet it was clear that her views on design informed her strategy for Yahoo and her leadership style. One of Marissa's points - don't design for the expert. Create a "big green button" for the thing people most want to do. Expert users can afford to work a little harder to get their bells and whistles. Simple things, if they are the right things, make a huge difference. Think about the impact of Amazon's iconic Add-to Cart one-click shopping.
Why this matters: Change-agents (managers, marketing ops pro's, communicators, etc.) would benefit from getting grounding in design. You might start with a little podcast I recently found called 99% Invisible.

Marketing in the moment: Marketing is speeding up. Few marketers remain unconvinced about the value of personalization. Messages are more effective when they leverage the viewer's attributes. Now it seems that time is also becoming an impact point. Your message is more relevant if it pops up within the context of a real-time conversation. Some moments are daily habits – such as exercising, or conducting a task at work. Other moments are occasional, shared, and public – such as a sports event or an event like Dreamforce. Some moments can be planned for but others will pop up opportunistically and you need to be ready.

Why this matters: Marketers pay lip service to the concept of "agile" but marketing in the moment requires a truly different approach than planning a launch. Agility is what enabled the Oreo marketing team to steal the moment at the Superbowl. Read this Wired story to learn how they did it.

These are three ideas that I'm going to pay more attention to.

Copyright 2011 IDC. Complete articles may be reposted. Reproduction in part is forbidden unless specifically authorized. All rights reserved. Please contact IDC for information on republishing or web rights.

Three Big Ideas from Dreamforce 2014

November 23, 2013/in Marketing /by 3 Created

Dreamforce, Salesforce’s user conference, is always a phenomenon – boatloads of sales and marketing tips and tricks alongside the philanthropic videos and big name entertainment. However, it was these three ideas that impressed me most.

Why this matters: Marketing technology platforms will prod two big changes. Marketing will need to reorganize and become multi-channel and customer experience oriented. And although vendors playing nice together will be easier to do in the cloud than it was for on-premise software, CMOs will someday find it valuable to standardize on a platform (or “cloud”). Hopefully, they will have differentiated choices that optimize for different business models.

Growing importance of design: I was super impressed with the fireside chat between Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO. I found Marissa’s ideas on design most intriguing. It’s a topic you don’t hear much about in business circles, yet it was clear that her views on design informed her strategy for Yahoo and her leadership style. One of Marissa’s points – don’t design for the expert. Create a “big green button” for the thing people most want to do. Expert users can afford to work a little harder to get their bells and whistles. Simple things, if they are the right things, make a huge difference. Think about the impact of Amazon’s iconic Add-to Cart one-click shopping.
Why this matters: Change-agents (managers, marketing ops pro’s, communicators, etc.) would benefit from getting grounding in design. You might start with a little podcast I recently found called 99% Invisible.

Marketing in the moment: Marketing is speeding up. Few marketers remain unconvinced about the value of personalization. Messages are more effective when they leverage the viewer’s attributes. Now it seems that time is also becoming an impact point. Your message is more relevant if it pops up within the context of a real-time conversation. Some moments are daily habits – such as exercising, or conducting a task at work. Other moments are occasional, shared, and public – such as a sports event or an event like Dreamforce. Some moments can be planned for but others will pop up opportunistically and you need to be ready.

Why this matters: Marketers pay lip service to the concept of “agile” but marketing in the moment requires a truly different approach than planning a launch. Agility is what enabled the Oreo marketing team to steal the moment at the Superbowl. Read this Wired story to learn how they did it.

These are three ideas that I’m going to pay more attention to.

Next Gen Marketing Teams: From Silos to Systems

September 23, 2013/in Marketing /by 3 Created

Automation has revolutionized marketing. It has brought new insights, capabilities, and methods of engagement. It has demanded new skills, thrust us into the omni-channel universe, and opened new levels of visibility and accountability. But these are all ripples in the pond, so to speak, only the most immediate after effects of a rather large splash down. The most profound change is just beginning to be felt. Automation has introduced the notion of an enterprise customer creation process, a horizontal function that cuts across all marketing activities. Effectively implementing and managing this process requires next generation marketing teams to be much more integrated and coordinated.

Despite its mystique as a freewheeling, creative and dynamic function, corporate marketing is in reality a deeply fragmented hierarchical organization. Specialists typically function in separate domains moving from project to project with great urgency, rarely having time to consider the big picture. The need to be highly responsive to changes in direction has created a culture adverse to structured workflows. However, as marketing automation solutions consolidate into an enterprise system, a diverse set of marketing roles, process definitions, and data structures are brought together. In response, marketers are beginning to redesign their organizations around workflows instead of activities. Rather than having social, web, advertising, content, partner, analytics, systems admin, etc. in separate organizational buckets, these roles are being reformed into cross functional teams responsible for executing entire campaigns.

Marketing solutions are starting to be designed around a multi-disciplinary community model. Adobe’s marketing cloud offers a collective view of the campaign workflow for each member of the team and unique workspaces for the various roles in content production, campaign management, analytics, etc. Each member can see what contributions have been made and why. They can communicate in real time on key issues and how they affect the overall process. IDC expects this trend to become pervasive. Providers such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others are driving their solutions around a vision of the “customer facing ERP” which integrates all customer facing functions in what will most likely be a hybrid cloud for managing customer experience. The implications for organizational design will be significant and CMOs should start instilling the culture of workflow based communities as soon as possible.