MARKETING

TECHNOLOGY
2017
Putting Customer Data at
the Center
FEBRUARY 2017
Nicole Perrin
Contributor: Tracy Tang

Read this on
eMarketer for iPad
 MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER
Marketers continue to adopt technology to support their efforts, and to refine their use of these tools. The
spotlight is on data as customer expectations pressure marketers to provide a personalized brand experience
across channels.

■■ As marketers continue to adopt more tech—and to US Marketers Who Agree that Their Company Invests
improve in their use of it—they’re becoming more the Right Amount in Marketing Technology,
2015 & 2016
satisfied with the tools they have to do their jobs. % of respondents

The best-of-breed tech stack, which uses tools from 9%

■■ 4%
multiple vendors, is winning out over single-vendor 25%
suites and other options. Although integration is 42%
a perennial issue as new tools are adopted, major
platforms have made progress in facilitating it.
47%

■■ Leading marketers are looking to be more strategic

41%
about their use of technology as they focus on making
data-driven decisions across channels. 24%
9%
■■ Marketing technology is just one component of digital 2015 2016
transformation at brands, but it can lead the way as Strongly agree Agree Disagree Strongly disagree

organizations focus on consumer expectations and the
customer experience.
WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report examines marketing
Note: numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding
Source: Walker Sands Communications and Chief Marketing Technologist,
"State of Marketing Technology 2017: Closing the Gap Between Martech
Innovation and Adoption," Nov 2, 2016
219256 www.eMarketer.com

tech adoption, which tools are most popular, how
marketers are dealing with data from across the
organization and how marketing technology supports
broader digital transformation goals at brands.
KEY STAT: A survey of US marketers by Walker Sands
Communications and Chief Marketing Technologist found
that 29% of respondents believed their company had
not invested the right amount in marketing tech in 2016,
down from 51% in 2015.

CONTENTS
2 Marketing Technology 2017: Putting Customer Data
at the Center
3 More Marketing Tech, Fewer Problems
7 Customer Data Drives Personalized Experiences
10 Better Marketing Through Digital Transformation
10 A Still-Busy Vendor Landscape
11 eMarketer Interviews
12 Related eMarketer Reports
12 Related Links
12 Editorial and Production Contributors

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2
 MORE MARKETING TECH, As marketers spend more on tech, practitioner attitudes
toward marketing tech adoption are improving. For
FEWER PROBLEMS example, 71% of respondents to the Walker Sands/Chief
Marketing Technologist survey said their company
Technology accounts for a significant share of invested the right amount in marketing tech, up from
marketer budgets. According to an August 2016 50% who agreed with that statement a year earlier.
survey by Gartner, more than a quarter of marketing
budgets at large firms in North America and the UK US Marketers Who Agree that Their Company Invests
went to technology, including marketing tech as well the Right Amount in Marketing Technology,
2015 & 2016
as general infrastructure. % of respondents
9%
4%
Allocation of Total Marketing vs. Marketing
Technology Budget According to Marketers in 25%
North America and the UK, Aug 2016
42%
% of total
Other
1% Marketing technology
47%
Infrastructure 23%
External services to develop, 21%
implement and integrate 41%
Services Labor marketing apps
22% 28%
Marketing software as a service 20% 24%
Analytics software as a service 19% 9%
Paid
media Cross-charges from internal IT 17% 2015 2016
22% Technology
27% Strongly agree Agree Disagree Strongly disagree

Note: numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding

Total marketing
Note: n=377
Source: Gartner, "CMO Spend Survey 2016-2017," Oct 24, 2016
220994
October 2016 polling from Walker Sands Communications
and Chief Marketing Technologist found that most
US marketers spent under a quarter of their budgets
on marketing tech, including more than a third who
allocated between 11% and 25% of their budgets to tech
tools. That spending is likely to go up in 2017: 70% of
respondents said their budgets would rise this year.
Source: Walker Sands Communications and Chief Marketing Technologist,
"State of Marketing Technology 2017: Closing the Gap Between Martech
Innovation and Adoption," Nov 2, 2016
219256 www.eMarketer.com
www.eMarketer.com
They were also more likely to agree with the statement
that the marketing tech available at their job was
up-to-date and sufficient, at 69% in 2016 vs. 58% a year
earlier. Respondents still noted obstacles in their way,
but nearly all of these were significantly less likely to be
cited than they had been a year earlier. Only the lack of
information had become more of a problem.

Nearly two-thirds of US marketing executives surveyed Obstacles to Implementing New Marketing

Technology According to US Marketers, 2015 & 2016
by web presence management and search engine
% of respondents
optimization firm Conductor said their marketing tech
2015 2016
spending would increase between 1% and 50% this year.
Budget 69% 50%
Just 5% expected tech budgets to decrease, and 19%
Internal resistance to change 33% 25%
said they would stay the same. Difficulty of implementation/integration 35% 24%
Lack of information 10% 13%
According to the Walker Sands/Chief Marketing Lack of executive buy-in 22% 12%
Technologist survey, marketers themselves were more Lack of interest 10% 10%
likely to manage and choose these tech purchases than Nothing meets our needs 7% 7%
any other department: 41% of respondents said this We don't need new marketing technology 20% 10%
responsibility lies with marketing, while 13% said IT. Other 3% -
Note: respondents chose their top 3
Source: Walker Sands Communications and Chief Marketing Technologist,
"State of Marketing Technology 2017: Closing the Gap Between Martech
Innovation and Adoption," Nov 2, 2016
219281 www.eMarketer.com

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3
As technology has become more embedded in marketing Email Marketing Automation Capabilities According
departments, it’s become important for marketers to to In-House Marketers vs. Agencies* Worldwide**,
evaluate how they are using it—and also to evaluate 2014-2016
% of respondents
new tech they aren’t using (yet). The Direct Marketing
Association (now known as the Data & Marketing In-house marketers
2014
Association) and Winterberry Group found that 44.1% of 41% 48% 11%
US marketers polled said evaluating their current use of 2015
marketing tech was a likely or significant priority in Q2 43% 48% 9%
2016, while evaluating new and emerging marketing tech 2016
was even more important, cited by 52.0%. 47% 48% 5%

Agencies*
Duane Schulz, vice president of digital and demand 2014
marketing and technology at Xerox, said this was a key 19% 65% 16%
step in building a marketing tech stack. “We found you 2015
couldn’t really build a stack until you’ve discovered all the 19% 64% 17%

tools and got everyone to be transparent about what they 2016

26% 57% 17%
are using, even to the point of getting procurement to tell
you about POs [purchase orders] you didn’t know about,” Advanced Basic Nonexistent
he said. Note: in-house marketers n=467 in 2014, n=483 in 2015 and n=494 in 2016;
agencies n=236 in 2014, n=246 in 2015 and n=210 in 2016; *agencies were
asked about the capabilities of their brand partners; **57% of 2016
respondents were UK-based

EMAIL AND SOCIAL TOOLS IN THE LEAD

Source: Econsultancy, "Email Marketing Industry Census 2016" in
association with Adestra, April 12, 2016
221379 www.eMarketer.com

According to the Walker Sands/Chief Marketing

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools have
Technologist survey, social media marketing tools were
also seen increasing popularity, and software providers
the most popular planned marketing tech purchase for
are seeing increasing revenues to match. According to a
marketers in 2017, cited by 32% of respondents. That
Gartner study, CRM software revenues worldwide were
compared with 28% who planned to buy ad tech tools
up 12.3% in 2015 over 2014.
and 27% who planned to buy email marketing tools.
Content marketing tools came in fourth place, at 21%,
The rise of account-based marketing—a strategy
and were the only other type of marketing technology
that allows business-to-business (B2B) marketers to
mentioned by more than 15% of respondents.
identify and target the accounts and the stakeholders at
those accounts that are the most valuable—is another
The survey also asked what tools respondents had
catalyst for marketing tech adoption. According to
purchased over the past three years, and the same four
SiriusDecisions, more B2B marketers around the world
came out ahead.
used a slew of tech tools to support the sales technique
in 2016 compared with 2015, including marketing
Marketers are making advancements in automation when
automation (up 7 percentage points), web analytics tools
it comes to email—at least, they think they are. In-house
(up 11 percentage points) and web optimization and
marketers queried worldwide in 2016 by Econsultancy
personalization tools (up 9 percentage points).
and Adestra were more likely to say that their email
automation capabilities were advanced than in the past
two years of the survey. They were also less than half
as likely to say these capabilities were nonexistent, with
the percentages falling from 11% in 2014 to 5% in 2016.
But their agency partners did not report the same kind
of progress.

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 4
Technologies Used for Account-Based Marketing
(ABM) According to B2B Marketers Worldwide,
2015 & 2016
% of respondents
Sales force automation
Marketing automation
Account-based advertising
54%
Web analytics tools
46%
57%
Web optimization/personalization
43%
52%
Social media monitoring tools
33%
37%
Predictive analytics tools
27%
2015 2016
Source: SiriusDecisions, "2016 State of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Study," April 21, 2016
211370
The same survey found that 35% of B2B marketers
worldwide planned to invest more in marketing
automation platforms in 2016, though that was down
from 41% who said the same in 2015. More than three
in 10 respondents also planned to invest more in website
personalization tools, salesforce automation and CRM
tools, and web analytics tools. Each of these options was
also down slightly from 2015.
Email marketing solutions provider dotmailer queried
marketers worldwide in March 2016 about which software
and services they were spending their marketing tech
budgets on over the next year. Two-thirds of respondents
(65% of whom were in the UK) pointed to email
marketing tools. Nearly half said they planned to spend
on CRM. Social media management, search engine
optimization and analytics tools all came in ahead of
marketing automation, at 36%.
MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 5
According to Real Story Group research, marketers
are most likely to report maturity in marketing tech
applications that are relatively unsophisticated. For
example, 54% of the marketing technology practitioners
surveyed in January 2016 (most of whom were in North
81%
America) said they were “very” or “reasonably mature”
80%
with respect to social media monitoring, and 53% said
the same with respect to social media marketing.
67%
74%
When it came to more complex applications, such as lead
management and nurture, most respondents were “just
62% starting.” Among business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers
surveyed, just 35% had very or reasonably mature lead
and offer management programs, while 39% of B2B
respondents were at least reasonably mature.
Best-of-Breed Is Best
According to the Walker Sands/Chief Marketing
Technologist research, best-of-breed marketing stacks,
which integrate components from multiple vendors, are
winning out over single-vendor solutions. Nearly half of
respondents reported using best-of-breed architecture,
including 27% who said theirs was integrated. Just 21%
were still using a single-vendor suite.
Best Description of Their Marketing Technology Stack
www.eMarketer.com
According to US Marketers, Oct 2016
% of respondents
Proprietary technology ("dark martech")
4%
None
7%
Integrated best-of-
breed architecture
Single-vendor suite
27%
21%
Fragmented best-of-
breed architecture
Limited piecemeal 21%
solutions
21%
Note: numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding
Source: Walker Sands Communications and Chief Marketing Technologist,
"State of Marketing Technology 2017: Closing the Gap Between Martech
Innovation and Adoption," Nov 2, 2016
219257 www.eMarketer.com
“The best-of-breed marketing stack has for all practical
purposes won,” said Scott Brinker, editor of Chief
Marketing Technologist and co-founder and chief
technology officer for ion interactive. “For midsize
businesses on up, it’s really hard to find a company now
that isn’t using a best-of-breed stack, and it’s become a lot
more feasible because the major platforms have become
much better at supporting a platform ecosystem.”
Those ecosystems can be large. The Walker Sands/Chief Annuitas found improvements in integration between
Marketing Technologist survey found that about one in 10 marketing automation and CRM systems among US B2B
marketers who had integrated best-of-breed architecture marketers in 2016. A year before, 29.5% of respondents
were using at least 10 marketing tech tools. Xerox’s Schulz had said they either had no integration between these
explained that his team uses a “core” stack of about 15
systems, or they didn’t know if they did. In 2016, that
tools, but also relies on “another 70 or 80 that are what we
number fell to 23.0%, due to small increases in the
call independent or satellite tools.”
shares with bidirectional integration as well as one-way
One reason for the success of best-of-breed stacks is the integration between the two systems.
subjective nature of “best”—they aren’t the same for
every firm. “These are winning out because there’s a lot of
variance from one business to another in how they want to US B2B Enterprise Marketers Whose Marketing
market and who their audience is,” said Brinker. “The best Automation (MAS) and CRM Systems Are Integrated,
2015 & 2016
stack for one company could be a very different set of tools
% of respondents
than one of their competitors, even in the same industry.”
Yes, but Yes, Yes,
strictly bidirectional Yes, but bidirectional
one-way integration with strictly Don't integration with
CRM changes one-way know CRM changes
THE CHALLENGES OF INTEGRATION
marketing
automation applied to MAS marketing 9.2% applied to MAS
to CRM 43.2% automation 45.9%
27.4% Don't to CRM
Integrating various components of the marketing tech know 31.2%
stack has been a pain point for marketers, but there are 13.7%
No
signs of improvement. Two in five marketers surveyed No 13.8%
15.8%
worldwide in October 2016 by demand generation
firm Ascend2 said their marketing technologies were
“extensively” integrated, though a larger share reported
only marginal integration. Among the B2B marketers
surveyed worldwide in March 2016 by Dimensional 2015 2016
Research for digital business transformation firm Note: numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding
Progress, 44% said that all their marketing systems Source: Annuitas, "2016 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Survey," Oct
27, 2016
were integrated and share data. A majority said some 219248 www.eMarketer.com
systems were.
But other systems may remain unintegrated. For
example, 51% of US B2B marketers surveyed by
Extent to Which Their Marketing Technologies Are Demand Metric and Socedo in August 2016 said their
Integrated According to Marketers Worldwide,
Oct 2016 social media marketing systems were not integrated at all
% of respondents with their marketing automation or CRM platforms. Just
15% reported integration with both automation and CRM.
Not
integrated
5% And integration may not be real-time. Significant numbers
Extensively
of systems are still integrated via batch processes,
integrated where they share data only on a scheduled basis,
40%
according to the Progress research. Rishi Dave, CMO
Marginally integrated
55% at Dun & Bradstreet, noted that a big challenge they
would be focused on this year was surfacing data and
analytics to the right groups on the marketing team in
Source: Ascend2, "Marketing Technology Trends Survey Summary Report," real time, so they could use it to make decisions and
Oct 12, 2016 create campaigns.
217991 www.eMarketer.com

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 6
Integration is also about more than just plugging one
piece of technology into another—marketing tech
must also be integrated into organizations in terms of
people and processes. This might mean reorganizing
marketing teams, or finding other new ways to work
together. Dave described Dun & Bradstreet’s use of
“tiger teams,” which comprised experts from various
departments and were put together in hopes of getting
the most out of marketing technology. While the process
of cross-functional experts learning to work together
was sometimes painful, he said, it was working so well
that the company is now rolling out the experiment to
other departments.
At Xerox, the organic changes in structure that bubbled up
thanks to adoption of technology ended up significantly
changing Schulz’s role. When he was interviewed a year
ago for the previous edition of this report, he was Xerox’s
chief marketing technologist. Over the course of 2016,
he took on the digital, social and content marketing
team. This year, as vice president of digital and demand
marketing and technology, he’s taking on a unified
demand generation center.
“What we find is as you develop clarity around your
stack, it’s really not about the stack anymore; it’s about
the business impact and purpose of the tools,” Schulz
said. “Then how you are using these tools does have
organizational implications.”
MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 7
CUSTOMER DATA DRIVES
PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES
When marketers are surveyed about what they
hope to gain from adopting marketing tech, “data”
is one common response. This is something of a
tautology: Any new tech tool is guaranteed to collect
and generate marketing data. But data—specifically,
customer data—is nevertheless at the undisputed
center of the marketing tech ecosystem.
Sean Brown, chief technology officer at agency Organic,
noted that recognition of the importance of data
goes hand in hand with successful use of marketing
technology. “Those [marketers] that have already begun
to put the effort in to put marketing technologies in
place are the ones that recognize that the data that they
have—about their customers, about their clients, about
their own systems, where consumers are going—is a
real asset,” he said. “They are the ones that have moved
the furthest.”
“[Data is] the one area where we have the most work
to do,” Xerox’s Schulz said. “If you think of these
technologies as kind of a combination of content,
technology engine and data, data is the weakest link
for us.” He added that a high priority for 2017 is “putting
together a whole new kind of marketing data model
that will allow for the data to influence the customer’s
experience instead of just teaching us things we want to
know after the fact.”
One theme of the interviews conducted for this report
was that while digital marketing and technology had
already helped marketers make more data-driven
decisions within channels, the next step would be making
those decisions across channels, incorporating data
from email, offline, the website and more to drive the
customer experience across the board. Brown felt that
last year was a turning point.
“In years past, I’ve seen plenty of clients who still looked
at their website as a siloed means of communication, and
their proactive email communications as a completely
separate endeavor,” he said. “Over 2016, the majority
of our clients have really begun to make those moves
to integrate all their consumer touchpoints, and do that
using marketing technology.” He expects the trend to
accelerate in 2017.
Wayne Townsend, president of technology practice at
Epsilon, pointed to a similar shift among his company’s
clients and noted that customer expectations around a
unified multichannel brand experience are driving the
change. “They’ve gone from looking at it tactically, by
channel, to looking at it from a consumer standpoint,
and realized that this siloed or channel-specific view is
insufficient,” he said. “They have to flip it back to what
the consumer expectations are, and those have changed
dramatically over the past five years.”
Using data to create a personalized customer experience
is what many marketers point to as the holy grail for
marketing technology. According to February 2016
research from The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
and marketing automation platform Marketo, marketing
execs around the world believed that personalization
technologies would be one of the biggest tech trends
affecting them in coming years. Nearly half said it would
have a major impact by 2020, ahead of those who
expected to be jolted by predictive analytics, artificial
intelligence or wearables, among other trends. And
according to November 2016 research from customer
data platform and orchestration engine Boxever, many
US senior-level marketers are already automating
personalization, especially on their websites (82%), in
email (81%) and on mobile apps (78%).
But high levels of omnichannel personalization or
customization require a strong foundation: cross-channel
data collected, cleansed and integrated to provide a
360-degree view of the customer, sometimes referred to
as a single customer view. When marketing automation
software company BlueVenn surveyed US and UK
marketers in September 2016 about the most valuable
data-related strategies, this foundation ranked at the top
of the list. In second place was using the single customer
view to provide personalized communications to audience
segments in real time.
MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 8
Data-Related Strategies that Would Offer the Greatest
ROI According to UK/US Marketers, Sep 2016
% of respondents
Bringing many data sources together into a cleansed and
marketing-ready 360-degree customer view
43.1%
Effectively segmenting specific customer audiences in real time
based on behavior, demographics, etc.
40.1%
Automatically coordinating concurrent campaigns to prevent
customers being inundated with multiple communications
38.1%
Connecting all channels for a consistent omnichannel customer
experience
35.1%
Automatically predicting customer behaviors before they
happen
34.7%
Reacting to and changing data and campaigns in a timely fashion
to optimize marketing performance
25.7%
Accurately calculating the value of each customer
21.8%
Source: BlueVenn, "Myths of Marketing Survey," Nov 24, 2016
221160 www.eMarketer.com
Relatively few of these marketers were actually doing
either, however. BlueVenn found that just 18.3%
of respondents were unifying their data sources to
provide a 360-degree customer view, and 19.3%
were doing real-time customer segmentation—fewer
than had implemented any of the other, less valuable
marketing strategies in the chart above. More than half
of respondents were working to implement each of the
leading two strategies.
Similarly, just 25% of client-side marketers surveyed
worldwide by Econsultancy and Adobe in August 2016
had a single customer view at their company, with an
additional 38% working toward this capability. Only 12%
had joined up digital with offline data, and the same share
were making data-driven marketing decisions in real
time. Still, this was up from a similar survey conducted in
November 2015, also by Econsultancy and Adobe, which
found that 13% of client-side marketers worldwide were
“currently implementing” a single customer view.
The BlueVenn survey found that the biggest barrier to
a single customer view was internal capabilities, cited
by 29.2% of respondents, with cost not far behind, at
26.7%. The Econsultancy/Adobe research, in both 2015
and 2016, found client-side marketers worldwide pointing
fingers at tech platforms that were not integrated. And
that integration did not appear to be improving.
Type of Technology/Platform Used by Their Company
to Manage Data Across Channels According to
Client-Side Marketers Worldwide, 2015 & 2016
% of respondents
Separate, nonconnected technologies managing data for
different channels
Separate but connected technologies for different channels
30%
29%
Single platform that can manage data from some channels, but
not others
12%
15%
Single platform that manages data across multiple channels
8%
5%
2015 2016
Source: Econsultancy, "Digital Intelligence Briefing: Succeeding in the
Omnichannel Age" in association with Adobe, Sep 22, 2016
216991 www.eMarketer.com
Nearly six in 10 marketing professionals surveyed
worldwide in November 2016 by the Customer Data
Platform (CDP) Institute, a vendor-neutral firm dedicated
to helping marketers manage customer data, said a single
customer view was an obstacle to their success. That
surpassed any other problem, including budgeting and
staffing. The same survey found more than two-thirds of
respondents considered a single customer view “very”
or “extremely” important. Just 6% thought it wasn’t
important. Respondents pointed to budgets, as well as
the difficulty of extracting data from their sources, as their
main obstacles.
Obstacles to Building a Single Customer View
According to Marketing Professionals Worldwide*,
Nov 2016
% of respondents
Budget
Extract from source
Organizational roadblocks 31%
Likely thanks to these problems, marketers also lack
confidence in what they’re learning from data. For
example, according to a July 2016 survey of data and
analytics decision-makers worldwide conducted by
Forrester Consulting for KPMG, just 38% of respondents
50% said they were confident in the customer insights they
51% got from data and analytics. Even fewer were confident
about what data and analytics taught them about
business operations.
Chris Curtin, chief brand and innovation marketing officer
at Visa, emphasized that using data is not a strictly
objective affair. The best approach to data, in his view,
is to collect information and then “formalize how you
subjectively will apply whatever comes from that data to
future action.” After all, the data gleaned from marketing
technology shouldn’t just be a “rear-view mirror,” he said,
but would be “used to inform future action—and at that
point you are into the interpretation business.”
And the interpretation business is a human one. Drew
Neisser, founder and CEO of agency Renegade, said that
his recent conversations with CMOs pointed to “a swing
away from overreliance on data” among marketers, who
had an appreciation of data but who did “not believe
they could be replaced by 100% logic-based computers.
They all can cite recent examples in which either the data
they held was incomplete or inclusive yet a decision was
required, one they ultimately made based on experience
and intuition.”
Even with a solid data foundation in place, that’s just the
first step toward orchestrating customized experiences
across channels. “We draw the picture in three layers,”
said David Raab, principal at Raab Associates and founder
of the CDP Institute. “We have a data layer, which
includes all the data assembly. We have a decision layer,
which is where you decide what messages to send. And
41% then we have an execution layer, which is the email, the
39% website and all the systems that actually connect directly
with the consumer.”

Other priorities in IT 29%

Fully automating these processes is possible, but few
Other priorities in marketing 29% marketers are there yet. “It’s still very much leading
Systems can't use 29% edge,” Raab said.
Skills to build 17%

Skills to use 15%

Technology 14%

Note: *72% of respondents were from North America

Source: Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute, "Best Practices in Building
a Unified Customer Database," Nov 22, 2016
220370 www.eMarketer.com

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 9
 BETTER MARKETING THROUGH A STILL-BUSY
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION VENDOR LANDSCAPE
Marketing technology is about more than just Marketing technology is maturing, as brands get more
marketing, especially at companies leading the comfortable with and sophisticated about the tools
way in their sophisticated use of tech tools. It available. But on the vendor side, startup activity
supports overall organizational goals of digital continues to be faster than consolidation—which is
transformation—and in many cases gives marketing also proceeding quickly.
teams a chance to help lead that transformation and
PitchBook data reported in The Wall Street Journal in
take responsibility for customer experience in the
August 2016 indicated that US venture capital spending
new digital world.
on marketing tech and ad tech firms was in decline.
Marketing tech companies were seeing significantly more
At Xerox, implementing marketing tech has meant more
investment than those more focused on ad tech, a trend
than just doing the same-old marketing activities at
that began in 2013 and looks set to continue.
greater scale. Now, instead of spray-and-pray outbound
email, the organization has a lead nurture program based
“Investors have invested an incredible amount in ad
on an individual’s history, for example. “Our website
tech,” said Brian Andersen, partner at digital media- and
alone has moved from being a marketing-centric product
marketing tech-focused investment bank Luma Partners.
environment to a storytelling editorial environment
“If you’re a new small company in ad tech, it’s tough to
because our tools caused us to start thinking about what
get funding. Martech is where we’ve seen more investing
we were delivering as opposed to thinking everything as
lately, but that’s starting to taper off and now it’s more
just a big catalog,” said Schulz.
about sales tech,” as well as other emerging tech. Still,
he believed that there is capital available for leading firms
Curtin said digital transformation was absolutely central to
who have proven their value: “Investors realize this is still
Visa as an organization. “It’s the epicenter in that so much
a growing market.”
of the innovation is coming from the digital world, and
that innovation is beginning to cross-pollinate its way into
According to Luma Partners, mergers and acquisitions
everything else that we have been doing traditionally.”
of US ad tech firms continued in early 2016 at about the
same pace shown in 2015, after a lull in Q4 2015. But
“Everything is about digital transformation, across
marketing tech merger and acquisition activity in the US
everything we do,” said Dun & Bradstreet’s Dave.
was down in Q1 2016 for the second quarter in a row,
“We’re increasingly moving our products to ‘as-a-service’
after peaking in Q3 2015.
because our customers are demanding it, so digital
transformation is fundamental, to marketing as well as
Results International analyzed worldwide merger and
product strategy, development and customer support.”
acquisition activity collected from press releases as well
as from Capital IQ, Mergermarket and 451 Research
While digital transformation may be occurring across
between 2013 and Q2 2016 and found the number of
the organization, Epsilon’s Townsend believes there
deals each quarter were steady between early 2014 and
is value in approaching the problem specifically from
mid-2016.
a marketing perspective. “It has to be a customer- or
consumer-centric view of digital transformation, or you
miss a lot of the point,” he said. “If you start with the
consumer transformation and flow downhill from that to
the people, processes and technology in an enterprise,
it does all hang together. [But] if you just take the
technology view across the enterprise, you miss a lot of
the point of what a digital transformation is and why it’s
happening from a marketing standpoint.”

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 10
Ad Tech and Marketing Tech Company Mergers and
Acquisitions Activity Worldwide, Q1 2013-Q2 2016
EMARKETER INTERVIEWS
number of transactions
113 112
What’s Next for the Marketing Technology Landscape
108 111
106 107 in 2017
101 98 101 100
Brian Andersen
Partner
74
Luma Partners
Interview conducted on January 12, 2017
54 52
43
Chief Marketing Technologist Editor Excited
About Ambiguity
Scott Brinker
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Editor
Chief Marketing Technologist
2013 2014 2015 2016
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Source: Results International, "AdTech & MarTech Barometer: Q2 2016 ion interactive
Market Review," July 12, 2016
Interview conducted on December 12, 2016
221457 www.eMarketer.com

The value of those deals varied widely, however, The Technology Challenges Holding Marketers Back
with spikes in Q3 2014 when Alliance Data acquired from Single Customer View
Conversant, as well as in Q2 2015 thanks to Verizon’s
Sean Brown
acquisition of AOL and in Q2 2016 when Demandware,
Chief Technology Officer
Marketo, Cvent and Sitecore were all bought.
Organic
Interview conducted on January 9, 2017
When Chief Marketing Technologist editor Brinker
constructed his annual compilation of marketing tech Boxever Tackles the Challenge of the Single Customer
company logos in March 2016, he found his list had more View to Personalize Across Channels
than doubled since the previous year. However, he noted
that many of the “solutions” he listed fit in more than one John Callan
category, and thus were double- or even triple-counted. Vice President, Marketing
Boxever
Interview conducted on January 11, 2017
Andersen suggested that in the future, more of these
specialized vendors will continue to be gobbled up by the
major marketing cloud platforms as the focus turns to At Xerox, the Marketing Technology Stack Leaves
Center Stage
cross-channel integration of customer data and marketing
offers. To that end, he said, “I think you’re going to see Duane Schulz
more pure blocking-and-tackling integration within the Vice President, Digital and
clouds, but also adding capabilities to their portfolio that Demand Marketing and Technology
will enable better orchestration.” Xerox

Interview conducted on January 5, 2017

Similarly, Raab pointed to growth among firms that are

enabling marketers to build the customer databases that Chris Curtin
are fundamental to these orchestration efforts. Chief Brand and Innovation Marketing Officer
Visa
Interview conducted on January 3, 2017

Rishi Dave
CMO
Dun & Bradstreet
Interview conducted on January 12, 2017

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 11
 Drew Neisser RELATED LINKS
Founder and CEO
Renegade
Adestra
Interview conducted on January 10, 2017
Adobe
David Raab Annuitas
Principal
Raab Associates Ascend2
Founder BlueVenn
Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute
Interview conducted on January 5, 2017
Boxever
Chief Marketing Technologist
Wayne Townsend Conductor
President, Technology Practice
Epsilon
Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute
Interview conducted on January 9, 2017 Data & Marketing Association (DMA)
Demand Metric
Pini Yakuel
Founder and CEO
Dimensional Research
Optimove dotmailer
Interview conducted on January 10, 2017
Econsultancy
Forrester Consulting
Fred Moretti
Associate Director, Marketing Sciences Gartner
Mindshare North America KPMG
Interview conducted on January 13, 2017
Luma Partners
Marketo
RELATED EMARKETER REPORTS Progress
Real Story Group
Cross-Device Targeting: A More Holistic Audience View
and a More Compelling Customer Experience Results International

The New Display Ad Tech Stack: A Simple Guide to a SiriusDecisions

Complex Topic Socedo
Marketing Technology: The Six Developments that The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
Matter the Most in 2016
Walker Sands Communications
Winterberry Group

EDITORIAL AND
PRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Balletti Copy Editor
Joanne DiCamillo Senior Production Artist
Katie Hamblin Chart Editorial Manager
Dana Hill Director of Production
Eden Kelley Chart Editor
Stephanie Meyer Senior Production Artist
Kris Oser Deputy Editorial Director
Heather Price Managing Editor, Reports
John Rambow Executive Editor, Reports
Erica Walker Copy Editor

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY 2017: PUTTING CUSTOMER DATA AT THE CENTER ©2017 EMARKETER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 12
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