5. Fail for the Week - this one is personal! A report out this week for a survey conducted in January claims roughly half of ad buyers said they use CDPs from Adobe, Salesforce or Oracle..Ummm the only problem is these are CDPs that aren’t yet released yet or just recently announced that they will have a CDP solution out soon. (We discussed all these new announcements in Episode 46: CDP R(evolution): 5 Major Factors Buyers Should Think About and Episode 47: Data-Driven Creativity for CX + Big Tech CDP News )

4. Hail of the Week comes from David: connected TV is impacting digital advertising, according to a new report that says 49% of video ad impressions are moving to CTV. Is David hailing the fact that ads are moving from Mobile to CTV or that ads are getting longer than 6 seconds? Find out!

3. In the context of the announcements from WP Engine and Get Response, we talk about how small or standalone marketing automation companies are growing via partnerships and acquisitions to offer a broader set of all-in CMS, CRM, MA and ESP capabilities to keep pace with their fast-growing Clients, whose needs and complexities are scaling fast (and have outgrown the basic all-in-one or marketing automation capabilities these vendors offered at the SMB stage.)

2. Next up, we talk about the blurring lines between Martech and Adtech and how this means that customer data privacy may be vulnerable (as may be the Brands extending ‘anonymous’ Adtech applications into ‘personalized’ Martech activations . The question we’re asking is are the blurring lines between Adtech and Martech making any kind of governance or data regulation that much harder?

1. We breakdown what Google Big Query’s recent announcement on predictive marketing analytics templates may benefit marketers – but we take it a step further and also talk about how offerings such as this could impact the overall Smart Data space (specifically how Data Lakes are getting smarter) and whether this could also impact the CDP space as we know it.

Chitra Iyer [00:00:13] Welcome back everyone, to this week's Talking Stack. We don't have a guest today but we have several interesting nuggets of news to discuss. Like Google Big Query's series recent announcement on predictive marketing analytics templates and how that might impact both the way, marketers leverage their smart database strategy or even the CDP space. And then we discuss how the blurring lines between Martech and Adtech are impacting privacy regulation. And finally, we're going to talk about how smaller marketing automation companies are evolving to meet the changing scale and complexity needs of their high growth users and how that's also impacting what the Martech landscape looks like. And finally, after several weeks we wrap up with a fun hail and fail of the week. So don't miss that last bit. But let's start off with talking about the Big Query Announcement David Raab. What does this query mean to marketers and how they run their small database strategy?

David Raab [00:01:12] Big Query is is a data store like a database that sits on the clouds you can dump your data into Big Query and then what you see going on here is once your data is dumped into Big Query now you can very easily say hey I want to build a predictive model, a machine learning model on that data. So you say all right this is the data elements that I have in here. This is what I want to predict machine go do your magic and out the other end pops a score on all the records. So again it makes it really easy. And they've even given templates for different kinds of marketing specific scores like segmentation or lifetime value prediction things like that the kinds of things that marketers do. So it makes that very easily available and custom scores built on your data. Well. it's a good example of the sort of democratization of the technology that becomes more available even outside of the context of a traditional marketing suite. Because here it's just baked into Big Query which is. our database on the cloud database that Google makes a variable. So it's a really interesting example of how widespread this technology is becoming, how relatively accessible it is. this is still not something that you're going to hand off to a summer intern but because it takes a little bit of sequel capability. But. it's not something new data scientists for either. So you're seeing again just broader access to these kinds of capabilities at an extremely reasonable cost.

Anand Thaker [00:02:42] I concur with The nice step that this takes in terms of using the data. We always talk about holding data is one thing but being able to use it. One of the biggest gaps has been where do you start. How do you start? How do you actually make it relevant to what a marketer needs? So these templates are actually I think the way that it's been positioned here. Like tutorial like templates is a great way to start and then you can play around with it and there's one difference between this and say your typical marketing attribution kind of templates are a lot of their templates for those are very subjective whereas this has a little more of an objective perspective on. based on the data that you're bringing into the table so this is really nice. It's this is what we mean by hopeful machine learning A.I. really empowering marketers to focus on their jobs and focusing on creating that experience of engagement as opposed to diving deep into the data in a very technical manner. So yeah it's nice and also I guess from a business perspective to the cloud wars it's going to be these toolkits that will differentiate one cloud from another and to elude a little bit to the CDP space and the way I see it what differentiates one CDP from another is what kind of toolkits or capabilities are you able to bolt on to the information that you have that's very relevant that's right there in for you. But David is that even the right kind of analogy about how potentially customer data can be used whether it's in a generic cloud or data lake versus a CDP and CDP platform.

David Raab [00:04:29] It's definitely an analogy that's relevant. what you're seeing is you're seeing the database kind of get smarter, have more capabilities built into the court the underlying technology so you don't have to bolt on to separate predictive modeling tool for example. So that makes it easier and then it becomes. In some ways more competitive with the CDP because the CDP adds a lot of reformatting and things and features on top of the database so the more that are built into the underlying database the less you really need that separate CDP .so the big cloud hanging over the industry as these clouds that say well. We're gonna have more and more functionality. And at some point, we have so much functionality that you could just use us. And you don't need a separate CDP. CDPs are already competing with data lakes to some extent. Now traditionally data lakes have been pretty unstructured pretty loose it's just basically a place you just dump your data and the whole point of the CDP then is to convert that into something that's usable. Well the smarter the data lakes get the more structure they impose or allow a user to impose without the help of the CDP the more competitive they are with CDP and the more people scratch their heads and say well maybe I can do this without a CDP so it's definitely something that if I were a CDP vendor I would be worried about.

Anand Thaker [00:05:54] And now it's well said. I like the smart database right. That's what we're trying to get to in a database that's . not only smart enough to react to what you would want for it but also how does the database actually start to give you. And I kind of alluded this to one of the other episodes was forecasting not just prediction in terms of figuring out how to shape the next campaign but truly understand what is the next engagement or experience that. More brands need to take advantage of whether it's opportunistic or whether it's very long term. Now we've got some really interesting things going on with this.

David Raab [00:06:33] You could put data in Big Query already of course. It's one of your options. You just like AWS and they all have data stores that are available. So what it does is again it ups the competitive to make it. Well not only can you put the data in our database but we'll also make it really easy for you to build predictive models and that's probably something you want to do. And the other guys will do similar things again. Amazon was offering their predictive algorithms so personalization algorithms and I would imagine we'll see the other folks doing that as well. So it gives them more options for marketers if they will take the time to figure out how to use them because it's still not trivial.

Anand Thaker [00:07:12] Yeah the one thing I'll add to is this is another opportunity where sort of a greenfield where marketers have the opportunity to expand beyond marketing in terms of how-how to understand what a company does how it reacts though these templates might be specifically speaking to the marketer but when we're talking about Google Cloud Amazon Cloud Microsoft cloud those are these are not limited to just marketing and I imagine that these queries will or these query like templates will expand to other parts the operations of the company which actually gives marketers or marketing leaders who take advantage of this or any kind of growth leader take advantage of this really can find some serious competitive advantages or uncover new opportunities new revenue opportunities or new marginal opportunities here.

Chitra Iyer [00:08:03] So our second piece is up for discussion today comes from three pieces of news this week all of which are about connecting Martech to Adech for presumably better programmatic outcomes right now we have news about ClearChannel Outdoor that's enabling advertisers to better target Preferred audience sets. We have news about LiveRamp buying DataPlusMath to connect web behavior to TV and views and we have TruOptik which has put a twist on the now possible individual targeted TV ads with its political data cloud. All of those news links are in the show notes of course. But the question we are asking here is are the blurring lines between Adtech and Martech making any kind of governance or data regulation that much harder? When it comes to customer data?

David Raab [00:08:51] Adtech is always sweating up, down and sideways that this stuff is Anonymized.Which is ,I think we discussed this before too it's like well we don't really know the name we know everything else about them but so long as we don't know we know the device we don't know the name of the owner of the device. Could we figure that out. Yeah in about two minutes but we will we won't store it any place we'll just pretend that we don't know and even if we figured it out we wouldn't share it with anyone. literally it is correct, it is anonymized. So they can get away with a lot. Because they're not storing PII. Everyone always suspected that was gonna happen. The big question about GDPR has been enforcement and nobody really thought that the current methodologies would pass muster with GDPR and the other one is PCR. So if they ever get around to enforcing it then the adtech guys are not going to get away with this at all.

Chitra Iyer [00:09:50] The lines between Adtech and Martech are blurring precisely because of that sort of customer-centric marketing that needs the marketer to follow the customer around on their path and try to be where they are at the right time with the right offer. Right. Technically, for example, a person passing by a billboard can receive an offer coupon on their mobile phone or with what TruOptik is saying, politicians, can apparently say different things to different people via their TV especially in large cities with mass commuters for example who follow fairly predictable time schedules five days a week. There's a lot you could do with marrying digital out of the home mobile web and TV right. Once you have all the data insights in place.

David Raab [00:10:32] The real use for these things with Clear Channel here with the outdoor is they just want to know the demographics of the people who were going by so they can decide what segment to target it to but that's about a millisecond away from saying well . as we know who's going past here we're gonna geo fence it and we can send messages to their mobile device not on the billboard but we'll use the billboard as just a physical place to store the receptor the antenna that's tracking all these mobile devices and then we'll push out the messages directly to the mobile that may in fact be connected to the message on the billboard or not but it's another way to deliver that. Another place to do your interaction . The lines are blurring. So much so that it's pretty much not even worth making the distinction anymore.

Chitra Iyer [00:11:28] Agreed. I think in practice we will see marketers building media plans that are aligned to the customer's real and virtual paths not necessarily thinking along the lines of a TV media plan or a web media plan or out-of-home media plan.

David Raab [00:11:43] Although. having said that and I would just contradict what I just said it's technically possible to target these things at the individual level but you do always have to bear in mind that that doesn't mean that you know 100 percent of the people who you're interacting with. The data is far from complete. It's not even necessarily all that accurate. So . you do have to realize yeah we could do this and maybe we get 10 percent coverage or 20 percent maybe we get 60 or 80 percent coverage but we shouldn't just magically assume everything's going to be perfectly connected at all times that's not the reality. It probably won't be the reality anytime soon.

Anand Thaker [00:12:22] I think the other factor that you might want to have to consider as well takes a look at these success rates and match that to your budget. Where will you spend your money? And this is part of the reason why. what kind of offer this particular suggestion. There's still somewhat of differentiation of how you would use perhaps like the offline and online and being delivered about it even though The technology is blurring the lines in the first place.

Chitra Iyer [00:12:50] We also have another set of news items this week that we think might have some potential impact on the Martech landscape. So over the last few years, we've seen a bunch of midsize standalone marketing automation platforms gets acquired right. On the other hand we are now also seeing more of these standalone doing the acquiring themselves to offer a more all in kind of solution that's tending to span CMS, ESP ,CRM and other bits and pieces presumably because as once SMB clients grow into midsize enterprises and beyond they want to keep pace and offer the major components of what those companies might need as they grow in scale. This week specifically we had news of WP Engine buying Flywheel and then we had Get Response that's adding on webinars, e-commerce, and more to its marketing automation platform. How does the growth of marketing automation users when they grow or when the users are marketing automation grows from SMB's into high growth midsize companies how is that going to impact the way the Martech vendors keep up and how the Martech landscape will shape up, say in three or five years from today.

Anand Thaker [00:14:02]. these particular acquisitions and consolidations or partnerships are very natural. . waves of business that where you reach a certain capacity you realize that you're a client you have affinities or alignments with your customer's needs beyond. what your current capabilities are. So how do you expand on that? So . if WP Engine. they they buy flywheel that was probably that's a big competitor of theirs but then also speaks to the HubSpot integration. The dual. the conversation was hey look small-medium sized businesses into. to a degree. large enterprises as well.

David Raab [00:14:44] What was interesting about WordPress rather well was that HubSpot started out as a CMS. So it's interesting to see them connect with the key engine which is saying OK. Right. And HubSpot has its own ecosystem. It's a platform in its own right. So you have these two platforms one of which is now adding as an app on the other platform and it might even go the other way as well I don't know. Everybody wants to be the platform that's at the hub because that's where you make your money right and then all the apps and just things that plugin. But of course, companies don't want to have multiple platforms. They want to have one platform So everybody's kind of racing for the high ground or for the central position that's going to give them control over the account and . not everybody can win that so it's an interesting battle.

Chitra Iyer [00:15:38] Yeah. But as the scale and complexity increases can the smaller more organically expand it platforms really keep up. That's where the midsize high growth marketer really needs more stable solutions or more best in class solutions. And then their stack starts growing and then complexities get even worse right.

David Raab [00:15:57] That's how you end up with a Marketing Cloud. We have Customers who want best of breed for each of these things but they'd rather buy it from one vendor and so that they go off and they buy best of the breed and then. theoretically, they integrate them and as we know they don't necessarily integrate them which is why they will have to build the CDP put together exactly what they're doing.

Anand Thaker [00:16:18] And why am I not surprised? We're coming back to the CDP thing. Well, I don't disagree. I love how you can trace it all the way back.

Chitra Iyer [00:16:29] Just a couple of weeks ago we talked about how integration is the biggest problem right for Marketers at any size integrating different components of the Martech stack is still the single biggest challenge even today And so probably this is one way of saying maybe you can get vendors to take on that headache than having to do it ourselves.

Anand Thaker [00:16:49] There are two things that are going on as well. In addition to what's above and beyond the technology that marketers should watch for .either as a high growth company that's going enterprise or. vendors who are looking to expand their wings as one is the verticalization in certain industries. So you have financial types of stacks that are geared toward that and those communities they speak about well we use this CRM and this CMS. And it's a best practice for us and we do a good job with it and then all of a sudden you start to see other companies do that and then you'll see that driving . some level of either increased partnerships or acquisition in that capacity. Sort of the other trend we should see or start to look at as companies evolve or brands evolve from high growth to more enterprise is the organizational changes and the talent that comes with it. many times you'll see a replacement of certain growth leaders at companies because they've experienced that complexity. They've experienced the scale at that larger level. They run at a different pace. There's a new level of professional capacity or capabilities that they have. And that changes the way that they even think about what kind of technology do I need to bring into our organization how do I run my teams and how do I lead this brand. And here's the way that I'm very familiar with. handling that. so for vendors who are going upstream? A lot of startups fail to understand and empathize with the complexities of a larger sized company because they've been running sort of this agile way moving forward.

David Raab [00:18:36] And one of the consequences of the organizational change is now we have people who are in charge of different channels. we used to have one person do everything. Now we have specialists and tend to want their specialized systems because they used it in a different job or just because they are now able to take advantage of the more sophisticated features so it almost happens as a byproduct of the growth that you tend to have more separate systems which is OK. But then you do have the integration problem crop up that you didn't have when you have one person doing everything.

Chitra Iyer [00:19:11] Yeah true some great points there about Martech vendor ecosystem is responding to and involving with their high growth users and listeners can find some of the highlights of this discussion in the show notes.

Chitra Iyer [00:19:26] After several weeks. We have time for hail and fail of the week as well. Comes from David this week about how connected TV is impacting digital advertising. A new report that says 49 percent of video ad impressions are moving to CTV. Now David, why is that a hail for you exactly? That ads are moving from mobile to CTV or that ads are getting longer than six seconds. What part of that wins?

David Raab [00:19:53] Well, the hail was people were able to sit still for longer than six seconds apparently to watch an ad with which We were wondering how low that could go. we are at the goldfish level we're going to go down to the amoeba level pretty soon. So it's nice to know that we are bouncing back up .it's really a big problem. There have been all these studies about how people's brains are affected in not good ways by spending too much time on mobile devices on the attention spans are getting shorter.

Chitra Iyer [00:20:29] So they should watch TV instead?

David Raab [00:20:31] Well, I know TV is going to be the saviour.no it's not going to rot your mind it's only going to save your mind. And it's only going to save your mind relative to mobile. Maybe someday we'll actually go back to reading books But we'll see when that one happens but at least that's a step in the right direction if not necessarily where we'd want to be. So there's hope for humanity.

Chitra Iyer [00:20:58] And in our Fail for the Week David, this one's personal right? Because there was a report out this week for a survey conducted in January where roughly half of the ad buyers said that they used CDPs from companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle which is great. But the only problem is that these CDPs aren't even released yet. Or they only just recently announced that they will have a CDP solution out soon.

David Raab [00:21:21] This was a survey of ad buyers who are not going to be CDP users so they had no clue what their company was actually doing and they obviously had no clue what a CDP was but they figured well, Salesforce must have one or they had a Salesforce using the CRM system or something else that they thought was doing what a CDP did. So . it was a good reminder to take surveys with a pretty large boulder full of salt when you read these things and we'll see these surveys all the time. Oh yes. 60 percent of marketers have a CDP installed and it's like no! We know how many CDPs are out there. There's no way in heaven that the numbers are anywhere approaching that high. that's just part of the uncertainty that we deal with.

Chitra Iyer [00:22:14] So I'm just bummed that the author of The report blamed it on the fact that there's confusion about what a CDP means because just means David you and I have to go hammer out more whitepapers explaining to people what CDPs mean

David Raab [00:22:32] we have to tell a story Chitra Iyer, we have to find a better way or maybe subliminal advertising BUY CDP!! (whispers)

Chitra Iyer [00:22:40] And with that promise of more CDP explainers and Davids whispered earworm that we hope will ring through your head all week. It's a wrap on the Talking Stack. Thanks for listening and please take a second to leave us a rating on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud.