10 Reasons Why Ad-Tech Will Collide With Mar-Tech

Ahead of next week’s ATS London keynote speaker and marketing technologist Scott Brinker shares his opinions on how marketing cloud technology is set to further disrupt ad tech.  

1. Marketing is moving from being in the business of communications to being in the business of customer experiences.
2. The culture war between inbound marketing and outbound marketing will escalate.
3. Respect in the C-suite for marketing (as a broad category) is growing. Respect in the C-suite for advertising has largely remained unchanged or is shrinking.
4. The massive expansion of marketing technology operated inside brands is steadily transferring power and responsibilities from agencies to brands. In-house teams are growing faster than budgets allocated for agencies.
5. Agencies, software vendors, systems integrators, and management consultants are all increasingly competing for influence with and dollars from the CMO.
6. Software vendors generally have much higher margins than systems integrators. The long-term implications of that for agency business models are profound.
7. Innovation in marketing technology is outpacing most companies’ — and, frankly, most agencies’ — ability to absorb it. The future belongs to those who can develop the next generation of organisational and human capital fastest to harness these new capabilities.
8. The marketing technology landscape is simultaneously consolidating (platforms) and diversifying (ISVs). We will live in a world of 1,000-plus marketing technology vendors for the foreseeable future.
9. Good agencies will be adept at using software. Great agencies will be adept at writing it. Amazing agencies will be some of the leading ISVs in platform ecosystems.
10. The single biggest disruption ahead in marketing is vertical competition in the digital pipeline between marketers and customers — a connection that passes through brand-side software, major websites such as Google and Facebook, and client-side software such as web browsers and mobile devices.

This article first appeared on the ATS London 2014 mobile app.