Best. MarTech. Ever. This March In San Francisco.

You can’t scroll a mobile screenful on Twitter these days without hitting several predictions for 2016. But there’s one marketing tech prediction I can offer with 100 percent certainty: the next MarTech conference in San Francisco, March 21–22, will be the best one yet.

More than 40 sessions await the nearly 2,000 attendees expected for this event. I’ll share some of the highlights with you in a minute, and you can also browse detailed session descriptions on the agenda.

To give you a sense of what is in it, let me tell you about the plenary “keynotes”:

• I’ll open up Monday, March 21, with a presentation that will cover both the shifting dynamics of the 2016 marketing technology landscape and my forthcoming book, “Hacking Marketing.” I’ll have more to tell you about the book soon, but its basic premise is this: Given the entanglement of marketing and software, what management frameworks can modern marketers borrow and adapt from the software community? Agile marketing is one great example of this cross-pollination of management concepts, but there are actually dozens of others that I’m excited to share with you.
• On Monday afternoon, we’ll dive deeper into agile and lean practices with a roundtable discussion on Agile Marketing: How to Really Make It Thrive. I’m psyched to have Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the CMO of Mozilla, as well as Barre Hardy of CMG Partners and David Lesué of Workfront join me for an in-depth discussion of the most effective and innovative agile techniques they’ve seen succeed in the real world — and how to overcome the myriad challenges teams face when adopting an agile cadence.
• We’ll close Monday with a fireside chat between me and Monique Bonner, the dynamic Global Vice President for Digital, Technology and Innovation at Dell. We’ll discuss her experience in marketing transformation, covering topics such as centralization versus decentralization, the evolution of martech stacks, programs to nurture marketing talent in this new environment, building human connections through digital touchpoints, governing brand and security issues while empowering staff with new martech capabilities and breaking down silos between internal and external groups collaborating on a global scale.
• On Tuesday morning, March 22, we’ll open up with a presentation by Ram Krishnan, SVP & CMO at Frito-Lay North America on Frito-Lay’s D3 Convergence in Marketing: Design, Digital, and Demand. Ram will describe the company’s pioneering D3 Studios initiative that brings together a divergent set of contributors — designers, creative people, data scientists and people who can actually code — to “make magic happen” across exciting new marketing programs and projects.
• David Edelman, the Global Co-Leader of McKinsey Digital, Marketing and Sales, at McKinsey & Company, will give a presentation on how to lead the vision and management of end-to-end customer journeys in this new environment. He will share how getting the value from marketing technology is a team sport and what that should mean for your investment priorities in 2016.
• We’ll continue with a fireside chat between me and growth hacker extraordinaire Andrew Chen, who heads up efforts to spur viral growth in “supply” at Uber. We’ll dive into a range of topics around the intersection of marketing, technology, “growth” management, talent development, digital strategy and more.
• On Tuesday afternoon, we will close out the conference with two back-to-back roundtables covering the future of marketing tech. While the sessions at MarTech are focused on what you can actually do today at the intersection of marketing and technology — which is already mind-blowing, given all the innovation we’ve seen over the past year — these two sessions will bring together many of the leading minds in the industry, those who have billions of dollars at stake, for a completely open debate about the future of our industry.

But those plenary sessions are really just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the multi-track agenda that contains the heart of MarTech — all 20-minute TED-style presentations that are designed to impart actionable insight and learning on highly focused topics, led by renowned experts and brand leaders.

You’ll hear from an amazing lineup of speakers on a diverse range of marketing tech related subjects, from top brands such as Walt Disney, Cisco, Heineken, PBS, Zendesk, DHL, Box, Clorox, Intuit, Coca-Cola, New Relic, Tableau, LinkedIn, SapientNitro, ShoreTel, Healthgrades, Akamai, Publicis, LogMeIn, McKesson, CA Technologies, Zurich NA and more.

And all those speakers are just one slice of it…

We’ll have nearly 100 leading marketing technology vendors at our exhibit hall. This will be a terrific chance to meet many of your favorite companies face-to-face, as well as serendipitously discover dozens of new ones.

There will be the opportunity to meet hundreds of your peers, make new connections in the industry, and enjoy a whirlwind 48 hours of marketing technology nirvana in the heart of San Francisco.

Join us at the only MarTech conference in North America this year and save $500 with alpha rates, the lowest rates available. Come as a team and score deeper discounts of up to 20 percent off. Lowest rates expire on January 9. Register here!

Scott Brinker
Program Chair, MarTech