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Year-end forecasts seem more grounded when accompanied by efforts to put the existing year in context.
For a sense of where we stand at the close of 2019 and to help us better anticipate what could lie ahead for marketers in 2020, I reached out to Jason Heller, partner and global lead, digital marketing operations and technology, at McKinsey’s New York office.
Paul Talbot: What made a lot of marketing noise in 2019 that will probably turn out to be overblown or unwarranted?
Jason Heller: Marketing in voice applications. While voice still holds a lot of potential in the future, most companies will not be high-fiving successful voice activations for a while.
There has been continued hype around influencer marketing, particularly micro influencers, but the reality is that the impact for most brands is not as high in the pecking order of where investments will pay off.
Influencer marketing has been useful as a mechanism to help marketers become more thoughtful and explicit about the value exchange they offer consumers.
Paul Talbot: What are the implications of CCPA and data privacy regulations?
The X factor in many cases is data privacy, and marketers are still struggling to thread this needle. Regulations, however, are a correction for poor use of consumer data, which has often simply been too easy to take advantage of.
This development will weed out the bad and lazy actors and allow skilled marketers with real product and CX differentiation to develop deeper and more valuable relationships with customers.
Regulations will prove useful as a mechanism to help marketers become more thoughtful and explicit about the value exchange they offer consumers.
Talbot: How do you see the role of AI in marketing evolving?
Heller: Our research suggests that the application of AI in marketing represents the opportunity to create billions of dollars in new value. This is a battleground that will have an uneven distribution of winners and losers based on how companies embrace learning about and experimenting with different tools, and how much they invest in internal data science capabilities vs outsourcing it.
That said, most marketers already use some form of AI in marketing even if they don’t realize it. In many ways AI will become — and already is to a large degree — the “intel inside” of modern marketing.
The marketing technology platforms that optimize the delivery of advertising (adtech), the A/B testing platforms, and campaign orchestration platforms are all using advanced analytics to optimize yield and consumer engagement.
AI can be broken into three general buckets:
1) Machine learning/deep learning that drives optimization of different experiences – you see this in the experience platforms and personalization platforms.
2) Natural language processing that extracts implicit insights and helps to improve the impact of text-based content – the best example of this is what Persado is doing with semantic AI assisted copy generation.
3) Computer vision that can understand the attributes of images and video that drive engagement and value.
Talbot: Do you have a sense of how much longer the proliferation of platforms and content choices for consumers will continue? What does this mean for marketers?
Heller: Proliferation all depends on your vantage point. If we take modern history (the last ~5 years) — generally speaking, media and content channels are actually consolidating, which also provides a new set of challenges.
The digital walled gardens (Google, Facebook, Amazon) represent the lion’s share of media engagement, and associated marketing spend. They are also putting constraints on the amount of data they are willing to share and the logistics of how to access these insights and tracking.
The programmatic ecosystem has made it easier to access the longer tail in a consolidated way. One area where we are seeing more platform proliferation is retail – where digital and omni channel retailers are looking to monetize the valuable shopping behaviors of their customers outside of their owned digital properties.
As with all media trends, some will emerge at scale, and many will experiment and fizzle out. There will always be new channels and platforms. But the economics of media are different today than the last decade or so. In digital it is “winner takes most,” and therefore we won’t see as many breakout successes.
Talbot: Any other thoughts you’d like to share?
Heller: Modern marketing is fundamentally about data activation to drive growth. And today it’s no longer a massive heavy lift.
It’s never been easier or more cost effective to create a unified customer data platform, and “productize” analytics to create customer scores, signals, and micro-segmentation that is the fuel of personalized experiences – at scale – across all customer interactions in their lifecycle.
Those who invest in the data/tech, the operating model to leverage these tools, and the talent to translate customer and business needs into real world solutions, will have an outsized competitive advantage to those who lag behind.
