MarTech Europe preview: Here’s what to expect in 6 weeks

We’re only six weeks away from MarTech Europe in London, November 1–2, and I’m thrilled with the program — an incredible roster of speakers bringing deep insights and experience across the intersecting fields of marketing, technology and management. I’m excited to give you a preview of what the conference will deliver, but first…

If you like what you read below and want to attend, register before 30 September in order to receive the “beta” discount rate, 15% off the regular ticket price.

Here’s what you can expect at the event:

Vendor-Neutral Analysis of Marketing Technology Solutions

The MarTech conference series is the largest independent series of international events focused exclusively on marketing technology. The agenda is shaped solely by what I believe are the most relevant topics, candidly presented by speakers from across the field, without bias towards any one vendor.

I will kick off the program on Day 1 with a talk on the overall state of the marketing technology industry, setting the stage with the major trends we’ve seen in marketing technology innovation and adoption this year — and what we are likely to see in 2017.

Theresa Regli, principal and managing partner of Real Story Group, will address 10 key myths that marketing tech vendors spread — and offer the accompanying reality for each one. Come away with a clearer view of the marketplace and a more practical take on the opportunities in front of you.

Jeremy Waite — who has gained a unique perspective by having worked in the marketing cloud divisions of Adobe, Salesforce, and currently IBM — will discuss differences between marketing clouds and what they really mean to prospective customers. He will present original research that used machine learning to compare the main enterprise marketing clouds and provide frameworks, suggestions and case studies to guide your own decision-making.

Steven Moody, the founding partner of Beachhead, will describe an alternative architecture to the major marketing clouds — and share lessons he has learned in applying microservice design to building a complete marketing tech stack, minus the unicorns.

Jason Heller, the global lead of digital marketing operations and technology at McKinsey & Company, will show you how to achieve personalization at scale with the integration of multiple platforms, a bespoke customer data platform and a dash of data science to power decision-making. Beyond the technology, he’ll also outline reimagined processes, new roles and functions and agile marketing methods that are all part of the successful formula.

To close out Day 1, I will moderate two industry panels, the first with executives from four of the major marketing clouds — Adobe, Marketo, Oracle and Salesforce. Topics to be discussed will include:

• insights into the latest developments within their product portfolios;
• how the entanglement of “ad tech” and “martech” is playing out;
• the state of ISV product ecosystems around each of their platforms;
• overcoming the challenge of low utilization of highly advanced tools; and
• what’s on the horizon for the industry in 2017 — e.g., machine learning.

As a follow-up to my discussion with the speakers from the marketing clouds, I will then moderate a discussion with marketing tech disruptors — including Google Analytics 360 Suite and Mautic, an open-source marketing automation platform. Topics will include:

• how these platforms are different from “marketing clouds”;
• the evolving economics of marketing technology;
• segmentation within the marketing technology platform industry;
• new technologies and paradigms that promise to accelerate disruption; and
• risks and challenges for vendors and marketers in an age of disruptions.

With both of these panels, the audience will have an opportunity to ask their own questions as well. What would you like to ask them?

Real-World Case Studies of Marketing Technology Success

There’s theory, and then there’s practice. At MarTech Europe, you will get both conceptual frameworks for maximizing your own marketing technology strategy and practical advice from practitioners who have harnessed marketing technology inside their own organizations.

You’ll learn from the firsthand experiences of:

• Unilever — Vineet Bhalla, the firm’s global IT director of digital marketing, and Vishnu Indugula, vice president of technology at SapientNitro, will guide us through the company’s digital transformation efforts.
• InterContinental Hotel Group — Learn from Charlie Aspey, IHG’s email marketing manager for Europe, and Nick Worth, the CMO of Selligent, how the company has made the transition from “batch” to real-time marketing — and achieved dramatic improvements in customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value.
• Basware — Ceri Jones, VP of global marketing operations, will describe the company’s journey in developing a data-driven performance marketing organization, explaining both the technical and organizational changes that made it possible.
• ABB — Susan Trast, head of communications at ABB Drives and Controls, along with Henri Syvänen from Avaus Marketing Innovations, will share their experience in digital transformation at a global industrial manufacturer: how they embarked on the journey, which tools and technologies they adopted, how their processes and ways of working changed and what challenges they encountered and overcame.
• Skyscanner — Colin McFarland, the head of experimentation at the company, will share Skyscanner’s philosophy for experimentation, from intuition and bias through common pitfalls observed scaling to hundreds of concurrent experiments, to why we need to “fail forward” if we want to succeed.
• Nutricia — Max Goijarts, marketing and technology manager at OnModus – Nutricia, will reveal how they build data-driven customer experiences, starting with a digital maturity roadmap, gathering and connecting data and then using it to drive the customer journey and successfully applying customer journey analytics to create personalized engagements that deliver maximized results.
• Luxoft — Piotr Golczyk, the firm’s marketing operations director, will share the story of their transformation to revenue marketing: expanding their marketing tech stack, creating a data warehouse to aggregate marketing data from multiple touch points, implementing agile management and developing new organizational capital with its people and processes.
• Travelex — Adam Warburton, the company’s head of mobile, will describe how Travelex went from obscurity to the top of the app store charts by capturing the mobile moment through engagement, using data and predictive technologies to shape their mobile experience.
• Sonova — Alex Mari, global director of digital marketing and e-commerce, will discuss how Sonova is leveraging digital and social media to drive efficiencies and build one-to-one relationships with consumers and B2B customers — increasing consumer intimacy and enabling consumers to connect with one another while internally breaking down silos to gain a 360° view of the consumer and align brand experience priorities across departments.
• Barclaycard — Sean McSharry, a UX planner and architect, will share how the way UX is applied to marketing is different from the way it’s applied to other sectors because of the rapid delivery time and the smaller size of many of the solutions in marketing environments. He will clarify the importance, utility and scope of UX in the content of marketing and marketing technology.
• BMC Software — Carlos Gil, global head of social media, will describe how BMC is converting employees and customers into global brand advocates; show how to use Snapchat’s unique set of tools to grow, scale, and convert; share advanced strategies for social ad targeting to drive demand; and teach you how to leverage Facebook Live and Periscope to build global brand awareness.

Expert Guidance for Thriving in an Age of Digital Disruption

The dynamics of marketing and marketing technology today are shaped by the broader changes that businesses are navigating in the age of continuous digital disruption. Some of the brightest advisors in the industry will share their insights for managing this whirlwind and harnessing it to your advantage.

Michael Wade, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation and Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD — and lead author of the new book, “Digital Vortex: How Today’s Market Leaders Can Beat Disruptive Competitors at Their Own Game” — will give a talk on Digital Disruption Deconstructed.

If four of today’s top 10 incumbents in every industry will be displaced by digital disruption in the next five years, how should executives react? Michael will break down how disruptors disrupt and will provide concrete recommendations on how incumbents should respond.

Shawn Kanungo, senior manager of strategy and operations at Deloitte, will present Beyond Creative Destruction: Hyper Cannibalism in a Disruptive World, explaining how companies must adopt the idea of “hyper-cannibalism” to stay ahead of digital description — launching spinoff internal units or groups that compete to quickly destroy their existing products and services. He will dive deep into hyper-cannibalism with examples, case studies and his own experiences.

Doug Kessler, director at Velocity and one of the world’s foremost experts in content marketing, will present The Big Leap: From Data To Insight. He will describe different ways of utilizing technology to collect and analyze meaningful data, ideas on how to convert data into insights that drive great creative and content and real-world examples of data and technology that generate insights and result in breakthrough work.

Justin Dunham, director of marketing operations and digital acquisition at Urban Airship, will present why Marketing Ops is a Philosophy, Not a Department, pulling lessons from “DevOps” in the software community and applying them in the context of modern marketing teams.

• Accountability through data
• “Test and learn” culture, enabled by good process and good analytics tools
• Technology as a competitive advantage, not a barrier to be overcome
• Playbooks and workflows that allow for the creation of higher-quality campaigns, faster

Justin will introduce the idea of marketing ops as a philosophy and contrast companies that embrace these concepts versus those who use more traditional organisztional structures. He’ll also illustrate the advantages that accrue to genuine marketing ops organizations and provide suggestions on how to get started or improve your own operations.

Sophie Wooller, consultancy lead at iProspect, will give a case-driven talk on People: The Most Important Martech Integration. She will focus on the “dos and don’ts” for organizations embarking on martech change management, using Tourism Ireland as a case study. She will share the collaborative process that took Tourism Ireland on that journey, their recommended tech changes and their approach to defining new roles and responsibilities to support this in the context of a broader organizational change.

Ulrike Eder, chief commercial officer at drie Secure Systems Limited — who has worked side-by-side with Agile Manifesto authors Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith for years — will present Agile Practices for Marketing Teams: Putting Theory into Action, sharing real-world case studies that illustrate agile marketing best practices and tools to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiencies.

Juanjo Carmena Ayuso, cloud apps lead in EMEA for Microsoft, will present Left & Right Side Of The Brain: Your Marketing Intelligence In A Digital World. Drawing on the left side/right side of the brain paradigm, he will discuss the optimal balance of human factors that result in delightful customer experiences and the data-driven engineer mindset that leverages data into a valuable asset. And most important: how to develop a reliable and constant feedback loop for the two.

Don’t wait, low rates expire soon

MarTech Europe will be here before you know it! Register by Friday, 30 September, and pay only £1,095 for an All Access Pass — that’s £200 off on-site rates. You’ll get complete access to conference sessions, networking, hot meals, snacks, free WiFi and more. Register today!

— Scott and the MarTech Europe Conference Team

P.S. If you are on a tight budget, consider an Expo Pass that gives you access to solutions and demos from leading martech vendors. Click here see all your ticket options.