10. A landscape of emotional and transactional experiences,
where each connection inspires engagement with another,
so the brand becomes part of the consumer’s story.
Story-systems deliver innovative consumer activation +
trusted technology at massive scale.
STORYSCAPESM
11. 11
SIGN
ORGANIZING
IDEA
DESTINATION
DESTINATION
TOWN
CENTER
DESTINATIONDESTINATION
DESTINATION
A STORY-SYSTEM
Sign:
A channel that attracts
attention and directs to
engagement
Everything is connected
through technology
Town Center:
The primary place where
transactions are made
Destination:
Place of deep and valuable
engagement enabling active
participation
The Organizing Idea
establishes the premise for
connectivity
Roundabout:
Content on a channel used to
connect channels and turn
people to other channels
12. All stakeholder concerns are important, but if we get
the user experience wrong, nothing else matters
Source: kkstudio » Katerina Kamprani | portfolio
13. 95%
firms say they are
CUSTOMER
FOCUSED
80%
say they deliver
SUPERIOR
EXPERIENCE
“Closing the Delivery Gap” study of 362 firms by Bain & Co
20. 5 MAJOR WAVES OF INNOVATION
1780 1840 1890 1940 1970 2010
RATEOFINNOVATION
Water &
Steam Power
Railways
Electrification
Mass
Production
Information &
Communication
21. We are in the beginning of the
6th Wave of Innovation but its too
early to see what exactly it will be.
22. “Because the purpose of business is to
create a customer, the business enterprise
has two − and only two − basic functions:
marketing and innovation. Marketing and
innovation produce results; all the rest are
costs.”
- Peter Drucker
TODO: Change the 4As logo to the Transformation 2015 logo
Good morning! Here we are at the last day of the conference, first thing in the morning, after what I’m sure was a great evening out here in Austin
And now I’ve got 30 minutes to wake you up, and get you to shake it off
We’re going to talk about the evolution of the marketing technologist
But first, I’m going to ask you to change your seat. Let’s energize a bit
Is everyone comfortable shifting chairs?
Now imagine that you just changed jobs – if you’re a marketer, for the next 30 minutes be a technologist. If you’re a technologist, be a marketer here.
TODO: pic from Her?
And now you’re asking, who is this clown that’s asking me to get up early in the morning
I didn’t get enough coffee yet for this nonsense
I’m a technologist. I work for SapientNitro as one of the lead technologists in our agency, working for our Chief Technology Officer.
But more importantly, I was born a technologist. Or at least I met computers in fourth grade and fell in love.
I have a long history of building huge technology driven platforms from telephone switches to unified messaging platforms to numerous .com websites to ERP systems.
And then SapientNitro shifted into the agency space, and I found myself a fish out of water
Suddenly a platform technologist is thrust into the world of marketing and advertising
It was do or die (TODO: better line)
Lucky for us technologists, Big T technology has a pretty big impact on the world
So much of what we deal with is about technology, in fact
Technology is a force that has evolved the human race. From the wheel to the steam engine and the printing press, technology is one of the most powerful forces behind human progress.
It represents the fundamental tools of civilization—the lever and the pen just as much as the smartphone and the superconductor.
It also improves the lives of PEOPLE. In our lifetimes we’ve seen the tremendous impact of Technology on shaping the human experience.
The internet didn’t even exist in the days of Mad Men.
I guess you might have seen this landscape diagram before
You probably have some real worries about the explosion of technology in the marketing space
Which ones of these should we be using?
How do we use them?
Who’s budget are they in?
This landscape gets busier every year. I read a stat the other day that for every MarTech company that gets consolidated, 1.5 are born
And at the same time we have the burning conflict between classic IT and marketing technology, as evidenced by this piece from Gartner Research, talking about the case for 2 speed IT, one slower, following waterfall and high ceremony, the other agile, fast and close to the customer, with low ceremony
We really are pushing to move faster than we have traditionally, but there are valid reasons for the Mode 1 model
There’s this smart guy named Philippe Krutchen who postulates that software architectures come from 3 sources… we steal, we use methodology, and we use our intuition. Fair enough.
In classical systems, we steal a lot, use plenty of process and try to reduce uncertainty as far as possible by reducing intuition.
But in unprecedented systems. that ratio is inverted. Intuition takes center stage, with theft reducing.
Now keep in mind that the 2 speed IT theorists would line up the bureaucrats on the left and the agilists on the right.
Marriages on the left and one night stands on the right.
There’s really no logic to that. You can deliver agile with both types of systems.
In fact its easier on the left as you get more practice
And then we have to acknowledge that delivery strategies like DevOps and Continuous Delivery have taken over because IT is trying to figure out how to be more customer focused, to support faster and safer change.
Not to mention the changes in products, packages, and frameworks that we use to increase the speed of everything from design to development to validation to deployment
It’s now an engineering imperative that we streamline and automate everything
That’s a lot of change in the technology realm
But I said I was going to be talking about marketing technologists
As we all know, marketing is about stories about the brand and customer stories and how those customer stories engage with the brand
Hence, marketing technologists would just be technologists without stories
Stories explain the world. They are the building blocks of language, culture, and civilization.
Story is also how we understand our experience
Stories drive meaning and connection to our experiences and to those around us
Tell a great story and people will listen. Let them live it and they’ll believe.
That’s the ambition of SapientNitro’s Storyscaping approach.
Storyscaping is how we help our clients create meaningful experiences that tell their story in ever present ways – by marrying imagination with systems thinking.
I’m not here to sell you on the approach, but a couple of our really smart guys wrote a New York Times best selling book by the same name that I would encourage you to read.
The product of the Storyscaping process is a storyscape
A landscape of emotional and transactional experiences, where each connection inspires engagement with another, so the brand becomes part of the consumer’s story.
Story Systems deliver innovative consumer activation + trusted technology at massive scale.
Every business process and every technology application that participates in the StoryScape are part of the canvas we call a story system.
At the heart of a story system is an organizing idea.
Like a big idea, it is borne of real consumer insight, but one differentiating aspect of an organizing idea is that its active and participative, and it allows the consumer to live the brand story rather than hear it.
It establishes the premise for connectivity between emotional and transactional interaction.
But here’s the really important part – a story system usually involves dozens of touch points, and all of these are connected by technology and data.
Yes, technology. All of it, from ad tech, to experience tech, to commerce tech, to backoffice tech, to integration tech, to data tech
After all, all those systems are impacting the customer experience. This has huge, huge implications.
So we have all of those touchpoints, and all of that technology and data underpinning them
In the end, we are trying to create an environment within which our customer can have experiences they want to have
On the way to a valuable business transaction for us
Which is great news, because in a recent Bain and company survey of their clients
It turns out that most companies really are trying to be customer focused
And deliver a superior experience
If you’ve seen this before, don’t shout it out, but otherwise let me here some guesses on what customers say?
Hmmm, that’s not too good
This is about how good of an experience a customer can have in the Storyscape
And as we know, it takes a massive amount of different kinds of technology and data to enable the story system for our customers
So at the intersection of technology and story, we have an amazing amount of evolution
The technology is evolving and ever changing
The pace of change is accelerating
And the expectations of the customer are evolving too
We’ve seen an exponential increase in the rate of change in customer expectations
With all the change, businesses and marketing are struggling to keep up
Technologists are struggling to keep up
In fact, marketing technologists are often referred to as unicorns. We all hope they exist but they’re never seen
Where can we find these elusive creatures that understand marketing and storytelling, and that also understand technology?
SapientNitro started an MBA-like executive education program for our senior technologists, called CMTO university, where we try to grow people who can bridge the conversation between marketing and technology,
And be a leader for CMOs, CIOs, and CEOs trying to solve this complex landscape
This is a great advantage for us and for our clients
But we need more evolution in this space than one firm can facilitate
And we frankly need more diversity in marketing technologists
We did a research study to try to figure out where marketing technologists come from
The results are encouraging in that we see marketing technologists coming from 6 backgrounds, with about a 50-50 split between marketing and technology type backgrounds
On the marketing side,
we have media and marketing analyzers – steeped in the analytics and the insights they provide
content curators who live in the content strategy and content management world
and marketing mavens who own brands and strategies
On the technology side,
data divas who know how to take all the data we gather and organize and structure it for analysis
infrastructure architects who figure out how to get all the technology to work together
and experience engineers who build experiences in this ever changing landscape
And we also found that many more of these marketing technologists are excited about the landscape than are stressed about it
So we have a good crew ready to take this journey
Which is a good thing because MarTech spending is expected to multiple 10 fold in the next 10 years
Somebody better be excited about figuring out what to do with it
And better figure out how to innovate with it
Russian economist Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev found that economic and Innovation cycles have some interesting overlap.
In 1925, his book around The Major Economic Cycles noted that Innovation occurs with a frenzy towards saturation and maturity followed by massive disruption.
But it’s pretty certain that marketing technologists will play a huge role
For businesses that have intention of survival over the next two decades, they must go back to first principles. And this wicked smart Peter dude is awesome at first principles. He says…