 OK, well, good morning, everyone. Really excited to be here. We're going to talk about some disruptive forces in marketing, really, at this intersection of how marketing and technology are coming together. I do wear multiple hats. I work at HubSpot as their VP platform ecosystem, which really boils down to helping HubSpot do a better job of integrating with all this other amazing software out in the world. I write the blog, chiefmartech.com. I've been doing that for over 10 years now about, again, a little bit about technology and marketing, but really more about technology professionals working in marketing. And then I also program the MARTEC conference. So yeah, pretty much 24-7. It's MARTEC, MARTEC, MARTEC. Friends will ask me, like, Scott, do you have any other hobbies, like, what do you like besides MARTEC? And my answer is always more MARTEC. So all right, one of the things I've done from a hobby perspective is, back in 2011, I started this little map of the different technologies that I saw marketers using. It was imperfect, just sort of a rough list put together. But at the time, found 150 technologies, shared them at a conference of CMOs, be like, look, look at how dependent you're becoming on technology. And the reaction in the room was exactly what I'd hope for, everyone's like, oh my goodness, 150 marketing technologies. How will we ever keep track of them all? And then over the years, I kept going back to this map with really, frankly, no design skills whatsoever. But the number of companies I kept finding that were legitimate MARTEC companies kept growing into the thousands. A few years ago, it crossed, like, the 5,000 mark. Last year, it was 6,800. This year, we just released this last week, over 7,000. And this is actually incomplete. I know it's incomplete because I've already heard from a large number of great companies that I sadly somehow missed. But this is wild, right? I mean, the amount of technology and marketing is astounding. And it's not just about companies creating technologies, because you could argue, hey, there is near zero barriers to entry in the world of software today, but it's that it's not just supply. It's also demand. Mary Meeker, in a presentation with Kleiner Perkins, stated the internet a couple years ago, found on average enterprises had over 1,000 SaaS subscriptions. And it wasn't just marketing, although marketing was the top of the leaderboard, like, with 91 different SaaS subscriptions on average. There's also HR and finance and sales. It's not just big enterprises either, a company called Blissfully that I like to think of them as tripping for SaaS, and I hope you manage all your different SaaS subscriptions. They recently found for SMBs, like for companies with, say, 100 to 250 employees, around 99 SaaS subscriptions on average. And again, not just marketing, but throughout IT, throughout sales, throughout accounting, throughout HR. So we've got all this explosion of technology. Now what are we doing with it in marketing? The roles of marketing have really expanded a lot in the past, particularly the past five years. I would say, actually the CMO council would say, they did a survey of CMOs a year and a half ago, and they asked, what was your top mandate? They could only pick one. And the top mandates were accelerate revenue growth across the organization, optimize customer experience and strategy, and champion a customer-centric corporate culture and mindset. And the thing that stands out to me about this is, right, this is very much about customer experience as a holistic thing, and there's a real focus here in connecting this with revenue and growth. So I'd like to say we could just simplify this and say, OK, well marketing is about CX and ROI. Do you know what happens if you build your ROI directly into your CX? You get LaCroix. And believe me, if you can repackage water for like a 5,000% market, I mean, come on, it's some pretty good marketing there. All right, so this is great, CX and ROI. But how exactly? How do we leverage all this technology to achieve this? A friend of mine, Doug Davidoff, had this tweet, I thought it was really great, and said it kind of boils down to focus and plumbing. I think that's a pretty fair statement. I'm not sure I love the plumbing metaphor. It kind of makes you wonder, well, what exactly are we pumping through marketing here? I mean, when we talk about marketing stacks, I don't want these images coming to mind. All right, I promise, no more potty humor. The way in which people are adapting marketing is that recognizing they have to change not just the tools of marketing, but the structure of marketing and the way in which marketing is managed. Study we did of marketing leaders last year found nearly 60% of them had been restructuring their departments to better take advantage of technology. And so what I want to do for today's presentation is just talk about five forces that I see marketing leaders, particularly in the world of marketing tech and marketing ops, wrestling with to achieve this. So I frame this as five disruptive forces in marketing technology and operations. And they are centralize everything you can, automate everything you can. So far so good. And then decentralize everything you can, humanize everything you can, and embrace continuous change. I know you might be sitting there like, wait a second, I assure you you're not the only one, Augie Ray, who's like a distinguished analyst at Gartner. His first reaction to this was you just put automate everything you can and humanize everything you can two places from each other. I can't decide if that's funny or sad. All right, well, thank you, Augie. My reply actually to Augie was, hey, listen, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability, told two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. And in a lot of ways, this really is the struggle of modern marketing. It's trying to hold these opposing concepts in mind at the same time and do them both well. So let's dig into this a little bit more. We'll take our High Wire Act here of marketing. Oh, wait, there's more growners in here, I promise you. OK, but we start by looking at this trade-off between centralization and decentralization. Now, normally we would assume this is more of one, means less of the other. Actually, it's through technology in particular that we're realizing we have the opportunity to do both simultaneously. And I'd like to give you a few examples. I mean, the first example is one everyone here would recognize right away with the web content management systems, platforms like Drupal. I mean, the whole purpose of a platform like this is to be able to centralize your system of how you manage and distribute content, the structure you use for this content, the standardization on presentation styles. All these things are really important. But at the same time, when we do it well, what we're doing is we're empowering a much broader set of people throughout our organization to be able to contribute content and deploy it in a way that works within these guardrails, that anyone can contribute a blog post or a landing page or any sort of thing that they need within that context. So a great WCM implementation, or increasingly we call them digital experience platforms, they're a centralized solution that's empowering decentralized activity. A very hot topic in marketing these days is also customer data platforms. Think of them as a next generation of CRM. Same principle applies. We want to standardize the central system of records so that we always have a clear view of the touch points happening with customers across the organization. But part of the reason we're doing that is so that people on the edge of the organization, a customer service rep who's dealing with a particular customer, has access to that data and can feed into it and update it. So there's a centralization, decentralization thing happening. There are even things like Google Sheets. Standardizing on something like G Suite is a centralization decision. But then enabling all this collaboration between people much more easily on documents and spreadsheets, that's decentralization. I mean we can even take this far into things like application platform as a service, which is really a fancy word for some of these ideas around low code and no code solutions that let non-technical people actually become app developers. And we'll take a look at that a bit too. So there's ways you can balance the centralization and decentralization. So the other access that we're struggling with is automation and humanizing our marketing. And one of my favorite statements on automation is actually from Fantasia, the original one, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Mickey Mouse says the Apprentice, and he gets the magic wand, and has the broom start doing his chores for him. This is automation. And it's delightful. Awesome. Up until that exact same automation starts happening at speed and scale, and then the exact same automation becomes a real trouble. Now, we might recognize this pattern in marketing. This is from Market Tunist, who if you take one thing away from my presentation, it's you should subscribe to Market Tunist, Tom Fishburne, who every month sends out a wonderful, every week sends out a wonderful cartoon on the crazy state of marketing. But it's like we've all seen these email things. Yeah, let's get you a call. Did you get my last email? Did you get my last two emails? Why are you out of responding? Increasingly, these things are not being done by hand by individuals. They're set up with marketing automation systems. In fact, in marketing, we refer to it as nurturing. You feel nurtured, don't you? Yes. But again, this is one of these things where this automation makes it very easy for us to do this at speed and scale. But what is the experience like for the actual customer? And I think this is actually a real challenge for marketing. When I look at automation, I think it's helpful to look at this on two different axes. There's things we do to increase the efficiency of our company's operations, our organization's operation. And then there's things we do to increase the efficiency for customers, making it easier, faster, more delightful for them. And so if we put these two axes on a two by two grid, if something is inefficient for both the company and the customer, the technical term for that is crappy. There's a lot of stuff out there that has that characteristic. Obviously, the ideal we're going for is saying, hey, well, if it can be delightful for the customer and really efficient for the company, that would be awesome. The other two, there are things we do that aren't necessarily efficient for the company, but if they're efficient for the customer, helping them get what they need and solve the problem they have quickly and smoothly, this may be worth it, because these become the moments very often that define our brand. Are we able to delight someone at a moment when they need us to go above and beyond? The one that's scary is the one where we implement automation that is incredibly efficient for the company, but not necessarily efficient for the customer. And that sort of example of the automated email nurturing thing, right? I mean, incredibly efficient for us to do that. Just throw the switch, nobody has to type in an email, but for the customer who's now having to go through all of these, yeah, we've actually made their lives less efficient. And it's so easy to fall into that trap, just because again, very often when we think about efficiency and automation, we're usually measuring it against objectives of, yeah, internal efficiency. And so I think the big mission of marketing leaders and certainly folks in marketing technology and marketing operations is to make sure that as we're bringing these automations to our business, we keep championing it through the eyes of how does this affect the customer's experience? You know, one campaign I thought I'd highlight on this, because again, this balance of well, how do you bring automation of technology and humanization together? Some of you may have remembered the T-Mobile campaign last year where, this is brilliant, this was a nationwide marketing campaign they did, but you're gonna love this innovation. They basically said, if you call this number, a real human being will pick up, right? So you're not gonna have like, you know, a voice prompt system that you have to go through. And not only will a real human being pick up, but we guarantee that human being won't transfer you around. Now basically stick with you until the problem is resolved. Now, the technology behind this, right? It's not like this is a completely technology-free situation. I mean, the technology that now we're giving those representatives, I assure you, you know, to be able to have the latest data on the customer, be able to take actions on the customer's behalf, be able to pull requests from other pieces of the organization, a lot of technology in that. But the face to it for the customer is very human. So in the next 15 minutes, I thought that might be helpful to like, put these together on a grid, automation and humanization, centralization, decentralization, and then sort of wrestling with change across all of them. To put maybe some other labels on this that we might be more familiar with, I think of centralization as things we do for scale. Decentralization is very often things we do for agility. Automation is how we harness technology, and humanization is how we keep the people element of this. And part of that's people like our customers, that's also our employees and our staff as well. You know, and so when you start to go at these different quadrants, it's like, okay, well, centralizing and automation is very often where efficiency is coming from. You know, when we look at technology in a decentralized view, this is very often where innovation comes from. When we look at what it means to be centralized with a human focus, very often this is the core of our brand. But how we make that brand real, not just a slogan, but real, is very much when we're empowering the decentralized organization to live up to that with authenticity. So let's just go through these quadrants and put a little bit of examples of what exactly do we do in each of these quadrants in leading marketing technology? And so, yeah, we'll start in the Northwest or North by Northwest quadrant, which is usually what people think about when we talk about marketing technologies, right? Oh, well, we're going to centralize and we're going to leverage technology. It's great. It's definitely a big part of that. You know, we do things like standardized common tools across the organization. Sometimes this is now called rationalizing your marketing stack. So you have the things you need, you get rid of the things you don't. I'm personally fascinated with how marketers think of their marketing stacks. Every year I run a contest for the community that invites marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates how they think of their marketing tech stack. It's not just the little logos about, you know, which tools do they use? So it's interesting to see which tools, which companies use, but it's, how do they conceive of all these things together? You know, and because it's a bit of an awards competition and because, you know, in marketing we have access to graphic designers, you know, people get a little carried away sometimes with the design of these things, but they're fascinating. And they're all available up on SlideShare if you just Google Mar-Tech stackies. There's now like 200 of them out there that, you know, but like this is one from Juniper Networks, how they've thought about organizing it. I said some people get a little carried away in this like air stream. The folks who make those like groovy campers, you know, their marketing stack, how they split into different marketing areas. The size of the different trees represent how much time they spend interacting with different tools. The, one other I thought I'd just pull as an example here was Paychex, which had this really cool like two-dimensional way of thinking of different stages they apply technology to, but also they look at their technology stack through the lens of, okay, well, how much of these things are automated, you know, going all the way down to how many of these things really require full manual interaction. I thought it was also cool that one of their foundational systems was Drupal, so cool. So other things we do in this centralization and automation quadrant is, you know, we standardize common data, you know, what's the structure for their customer records, maybe the single most important piece of data to standardize on is how we're tracking customer identity across the different touch points we have with them. We standardize processes, you know, classic marketing operations. And increasingly, I think we start to look at the marketing stack and the marketing ops organization as in many ways a platform itself, right? It's a combination of tools underneath the surface, but we're trying to package them up, you know, as a platform to empower the rest of the marketing org and even the rest of, you know, the business itself to leverage it. So let's slide over to the decentralized portion of technology here. And this is where, right, we wanna be able to enable local experiments and workflows because not every team, you know, in marketing, not every individual needs to do the exact same things. They have different missions, different jobs. While we centralized a lot of tools, we also get to decide, hey, where is it okay for individuals or small teams to bring some of their own tools that are purpose fit to what they're doing? How do we think about it when we have these multiple tools dealing in a world where there's federated data, you know, that yes, there may be a centralized record of this too, but there's variations of this throughout the org, you know, that can be okay as long as we figure out a way to connect the important pieces. And one in particular that I alluded to earlier that I'm just fascinated by is this notion of citizen developers and data scientists and integrators, this idea that non-technical professionals increasingly have the tools to be able to do things that use to require a technical specialist. So, you know, if any of you remember that movie, Rat Tattooie, and say, if anyone can cook, you know, anyone can develop, integrate, analyze. And you might be skeptical of this, so I'm gonna walk you through it. I'm gonna show you how every marketer, give or take, every marketer is an app developer now. All right, so let's imagine over time the amount of app-like functionality that any marketer can wield. We'll start with Excel. How many of you have used Excel? Okay, great. Pretty straightforward, right? This was marketing technology before there was marketing technology. We love Excel. Well, actually in more recent times, a number of folks may have moved to something like G Suite and Google Sheets. Couple reasons for that. One is actually, it really did have a nice environment for having multiple people collaborating on the same sheet at the same time. But another little twist to this came up, which is one of the other things in the G Suite is you can publish web forums, you know, either internal or external, you can collect data and then map that right into a Google Sheet. So now if you think about this, right, you can essentially publish a little data collection app out in the world and pull that data right into a spreadsheet. So a little bit more app-like functionality. Then how many of you have heard of a tool or use a tool called Zapier? Okay, quite a few. This is, there's a whole bunch of these out here. They're these really lightweight, non-technical tools that let you basically create these little workflows between all your different cloud applications, you know. So for instance, if I, you know, I'm getting data that's, you know, coming through on a web forum, I can then like, you know, map that to things like Google Sheets. But I can also take stuff like in Google Sheets and I can map that data into things like my CRM or my marketing automation platform. And again, it's very, very simple interface, but now, right, you add this on top of the spreadsheet and the forums and all of a sudden, well, okay, without any code, any IT, I can now kind of like collect data from anywhere, move it around my entire marketing stack. Pretty impressive. Well actually taking this idea of using spreadsheets or spreadsheet-like formats to build apps has exploded. You know, there's companies like Airtable, worth looking up. Like if you can create a spreadsheet, you can create a web app. Salesforce actually, last year released this thing that you can actually take a spreadsheet, upload it to Salesforce and they'll turn it into one of their Lightning apps. I even came across this company a couple weeks ago, Glide, that again, same idea. Basically you create a spreadsheet in a certain set of columns, then it turns around and automatically publishes that as a mobile app. So if you can use Excel, congratulations, you're all app developers too. This is happening throughout technology, right? I mean, you know, this democratization where things that used to require discipline experts, like, you know, specialists in IT, it starts to come down to domain experts. What we would think of as marketing technologists or marketing ops leaders, you know, but then increasingly to power users and regular users, just the cost to do this becomes, you know, cheaper and cheaper. And as basic economics go, right, the cheaper it becomes, the more of it we get. And so we see this transformation happening in the world of IT about the shift from code to low code to no code. Maybe at some point, no build, it just happens. And it kind of mirrors what we're seeing in marketing. This transition from IT to marketing technologists to increasingly any marketer in the organization being able to wield this capability. And this is really where I think we see this sort of citizen developer movement happening in marketing. And so then the 10 years that I've been writing about the intersection of marketing and technology, the big transition we wrestled with was this transition of how much to hand off between the IT department and the marketing team. I think over the next five to 10 years, this transition of how do we empower more and more decentralized capabilities to the entire marketing org is gonna be an amazing transition. All right, so let's slide down a bit from the technology side into the human elements of this, right? And maybe the big thing is this focus on marketing empowerment, you know, I think the key of this is recognizing that marketing is no longer just the marketing department. It's empowering the people in our sales organizations, our customer service organizations to be able to respond to the needs and the concerns that individual prospects and customers have. It's about giving those people the levers for empathy and intuition, you know. How many of you have ever been on a customer service call where, I mean, you were having a problem and the customer service rep understood it, right? I mean, they got it, they knew what your problem was, they felt for you, and they're like, I'm sorry, I can't do, I don't have the authority to do this, you're gonna have to call this other hotline, you know, I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking for everyone on that call. It's like, yes, we were almost there, but sorry. And again, in some ways, that T-Mobile campaign, I think really spoke to this pain point. How can we just empower the organization? It involves having marketing and including marketing ops and marketing tech people do the anthropological exercise of spend time in person with customers and really understand them to the degree that we're applying technology to this too. It's about not just technology for creating experiences, but it's how do we put technology in place to help us get better at determining anomalies in what we expect that customer experience to be. And then I think you pull all that back into the centralization and humanization, you know, that sort of brand quadrant where a couple of the things I'd put in here, one is this idea of marketing enablement. Now in marketing, we've been familiar for a long time with sales enablement, right? We make all this content and capabilities to help salespeople be more effective with what they do. With all this technology here, it's really important for us to provide that same sort of enablement for our marketing themes too. Study we did last year, found on average two thirds of the companies we talked to just admitted they don't think they have the skills or talent necessary to take good advantage of marketing technology. One very concrete example I thought was fascinating is Airbnb, which is a very data-driven company. They've created some amazing technological infrastructure for getting data from experiments and using it to make decisions. But one of the things they realized is, wow, that's great, we got all this technology for it. Most of the people coming into Airbnb didn't really know how to leverage that to make good data-driven decisions. And so they created a whole data university inside Airbnb and everyone who joins Airbnb goes through this. And they've been very open about sharing the details of this university. They have like a whole medium account for it. But it's fascinating, this is marketing enablement, right? It's helping to teach the entire organization how to take advantage of this technology effectively. It's about enlightened governance, right? This idea that centralization is good, but we don't want to get to the point where it's so constrictive that it basically shuts off that decentralized authenticity and innovation. It's about using things like customer codes and culture codes to have a common purpose and direction we're using, but giving people enough flexibility in how they implement that to be effective. And then at the center of this whole adventure is the fact that however you construct these pieces, it's that we're living in a world where change is just coming at us at an incredible rate. I'd say in the 10 years I've been doing this, the biggest paradox has been watching companies wrestle with the exponential change in technology, which we can more or less say is true, right? I mean, this is kind of Moore's law, but taken across so many things. And having that juxtaposed against the way in which we change as human beings and as clusters of human beings and organizations mean organizational change is slow. And so this gap that widens between these is really challenging. There's two ways we can deal with that. One is we can be very intentional in choosing which changes we embrace. And the other thing we can do is we can actually think about, okay, how do we, we can't make our organization exponential, but can we be more agile than our competitors? And so this comes down to doing things like, designing our marketing tech stacks for change. In the interest of time, I won't dig too deep into this, but there's a Gartner model for thinking about designing IT stacks to have stable foundations going up to systems that change very rapidly. And this is something we're now seeing marketing tech and ops teams embrace naturally. One of the stackies we got a few years ago from Microsoft, they actually mapped their entire stack around these three different colors of blue that represent that Gartner pace layering model from stable foundations to more innovative experiments. Agile marketing is another way in which we do this. It's not just pretty words to say, there's actual methodology here. Super excited to see Roland Smartz gonna be presenting on this track later today. He's one of the world experts in agile marketing. And I just ran into my good friend in the audience here, Jim Yoll, who's another pioneer in agile marketing. So if you see Jim connect with him, but increasingly we're seeing a study from Agile Sherpa's just recently found about a third of marketing orgs are embracing some kind of agile. And again, not just pretty words to say, but they're doing actual agile methodologies, everything from stand-ups to retrospectives that we're using Kanban boards, you know, a variety of ways you can implement this, but it's about being very intentional of saying, hey, listen, dealing with iterative and adaptive change is a core part of what marketing must now do. And there's so many things, right? I mean, you know, reading on red teaming and anti-fragility, but it really comes down to maybe one thing above all else, which is just marketing really needs to have be the champion of an open mindset, not for just how we continually evolve and change the way we do business, but the way we adapt to these ever-changing customer expectations of what a great business does. So thank you very much. I will be around after the next talk too, and happy to answer questions one-on-one. Thank you.