The MarTech Summit Advisory Board, consisting of 20 prominent MarTech leaders, recently gathered for our first virtual roundtable meeting of 2023.  

An extensive meeting saw the members discuss and determine the top three things that marketers should embrace in 2023 as well as covered valuable insights and recommendations to help guide companies in their marketing efforts in the coming year. 

The board’s discussions and insights have resulted in a comprehensive report, outlining the key strategies and technologies that marketers should adopt in the coming year to stay  

What Markets Should Embrace in 2023

In the first discussion point, each room discusses several key insights marketers should embrace in 2023. One of the main points is the importance of marketing automation implementation, including Customer Data Platform and generative AI tools like ChatGPT.    

For CDP, Neha Dadbhawala, Director, Digital Operations, McAfee states, “In this economy, we want to be able to scale faster, grow our teams at the at the speed at which we want to achieve personalisation and I think automation is going to get us there.” This shows that automation can help marketers achieve their goals in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.    

Jessie Chong, Marketing Director, SEA, Trend Micro also shares the importance of data interpretation: “How we can get our hang around and how do we interpret the data better, faster and more accurately. And that becomes very important for example like intent data. You know all sorts of data that is made available publicly. Still, then we need to be able to take those data and interpret that so that the business will understand the impact.“    

Mike Borrelli, Global Functional Lead & Sr. Product Owner – Marketing Technology – Activation Platforms, Henkel talks about how Generative AI is reshaping the future. ChatGPT: Chatbot launched by OpenAI – “It’s all about streamlining for efficiency now in marketing, therefore finding different tools and ways to achieve that is a huge topic focus”. Akina added “looking at how ChatGPT might replace human labour as it is timesaving, and it has higher accuracy“. 

Dr. Sheela Siddappa, Principal Data Scientist, Kyndryl also shares: AI utilises data efficiently and effectively, allowing us to be able to access information more easily. “We have a lot of data, but it’s just there and nobody is sitting there to analyse and take it forward. So can we embrace AI to the extent that the audio or the text gets converted into information close to real-time, so that by the end of the marketing event, we already have a summary report ready which talks about it.“    

Another key insight is the need to focus on economic recession and KPI. As Vincent Leung, Global Head of Digital Brand Marketing, Global Marketing and Branding, Lenzing states, “Each dollar matters, and it has to have some sort of marketing returning investment as well as more meaning behind the KPIs importance.” This highlights the need for marketers to be mindful of the current economic situation and to ensure that their marketing strategies can generate a return on investment.   

Arvin Singh, Co-Founder & CEO at Hoolah also highlights the importance of going back to basics and getting the fundamentals right. “Content marketing, building digital ads that are B2B focused, getting into some basic LinkedIn advertising and shifting away from static imagery to video.“    

“Fundamentals can never go wrong“, Evan Januli, VP of Brands & Marketing, ASTRO – PT Astro Technologies Indonesia states, “therefore people are becoming more and more scared to innovate, especially now with the external threats such as recession and possible layoffs due to AI and technology.”     

To this point, Wioleta Kawecka, Chief Data Officer, Finder states the need for companies to experiment and iterate, rather than solely focusing on innovation. “Companies need to start experimenting and iterating (over innovation) – cheap, fast ideas that can help businesses to move faster.” This suggests that marketers should focus on testing and refining their strategies rather than trying to come up with new and untested ideas.   

Finally, the Advisory Board also raises the new development of Web 3.0, and Google Analytics 4, as well as covering Cookieless and the next phase of personalisation. For Web3, Akina Ho, Formerly Head of Digital Transformation & Innovation, Great Eagle Holdings shares her thoughts, “we need to talk about how the Web3.0 space changes the audience type, change the way audiences are looking at content and how they are engaging with the brands. But the companies and I think we need to talk about the new tech that’s involved in Web3.0, that it’s going to change how marketing is being done“. 

Vincent states, “Google Analytics is non-GDPR compliant and we and other companies, European companies, some of them are actually looking away from Google and seeing if there are alternatives. So, seeing others and how we can improve on that would be great. Regarding all this cookieless of privacy acts etc.”  

Regarding personalisation, Jonathan Wan, Formerly Director of Global Customer Experience and Marketing at Japan Airlines shares “I think for a lot of brands 2022 was really the year where we started gathering a lot of zero-party first-party data. So, activating all these data through your data warehouses and all those would require a lot of collaboration between marketing, and you know, the different organisations, the departments within your organisations. So that’s something that us at goal.” E.g., consolidating different loyalty programmes, where they are finally activating data for achieving personalisation.  

What’s an Enjoyable Sponsor Presentation?

Next, we asked the Advisory Board whether they had any experience in ways that they have enjoyed a sponsors presentation recently and they came up with areas that they would like to see happen within effective presentations at events like ours. 

• Have used case studies – how do people use your technology and what are the results that you already have out there  
• Storytelling – so that audience can relate to themselves and not just listen to features that they might not fully understand the functions and cause confusion  
• List out the Added Values of the product that it will provide  
• Collaboration (beneficial for both vendor as well as customers) – Engage the audience e.g., Breakout groups (Blend your audience groups with both brands and agencies) towards a common goal or problem to solve. To captivate them through participation   
• More of a “real hardcore Q&A session” – Jonathon (Room 3): Because often customers are already familiar and don’t need another sales pitch. They need to find solutions to their already identified pain points.  
• Have visuals such as a demo, or live experience and tie it to a real-life scenario  
• Have DEMOs   
• Understand that attendees are not looking to change their whole ERP system, but rather parts of it or a supplement of it. Therefore, understand how your products can integrate with their systems e.g., Microsoft Dynamic   
• Pre-arranged meetings where vendors ask individuals and reach out beforehand for their needs, so they can pitch directly and there’s no time wasting.   
• Personalisation – Getting the correct person to speak and reach out (knew the roles of speaker); don’t want to just speak to another salesperson or pitcher  
• Keep to time – Don’t go overtime and interrupt the process or speed of other speakers   

Splitting B2B and B2C Agenda

Finally, when we asked the Advisory Board for their opinion on splitting our event agenda to accommodate for B2B / B2C specific tracks OR SME Corporate Tracks at our physical events there were mixed opinions. Overall, I think the outcome was that more targeted sessions for the audience work well but they prefer to have catch-up OnDemand if so.   

Sources of News and Insights

Here we are also including a list of useful links & names of materials that the Board use to get cutting-edge insights as marketers : 

• Twitter  
• LinkedIn  
• Podcasts  
• Events  
• Following Companies Directly  
• Tech News  
• Exponential View Newsletter  
• IDC  
• Forrester  
• Gartner Reports  
• Marketing Interactive  
• The Drum  
• https://martech.org/   
• https://etumos.com/marketing-technology-resources/   
• Telum  
• Teneo Insights  

Thank You for Joining our Advisory Board

Within this virtual roundtable to kick off 2023 the MarTech Summit Advisory Board members were able to provide valuable insights. It’s great to see that they are committed to sharing their knowledge and expertise with us and others in the industry. 

Facilitating networking and collaboration among industry leaders is an important aspect of any advisory board and I’m sure that the members of the MarTech Summit Advisory Board will continue to make valuable contributions in the future. 

We hope you enjoy this customised resourceful report and if you have any further questions or need additional information, please don’t hesitate to ask, otherwise we look forward to hosting you again in Q2! 

If you find other board members’ thoughts inspiring and want to discuss more with them about it, please feel free to find each other’s LinkedIn profile through the shared attendance list, or browse BEETc’s Advisory Board webpage: Advisory Board – Home | BEETc.

Team BEETc