MarTech Masters: In Conversation With series will feature video interviews with some of the brightest minds in MarTech, who will be sharing their insights, discussing trends, and addressing challenges within the MarTech landscape.

How would you describe yourself in three words?

Amin: I would say – thinking outside the box, creative technical strategist and a passionate problem solver.

What do you think people in the industry are most keen to understand in 2023?

Amin: I would say in the current climate, we’re coming off the back of COVID and still trying to recover. It’s really how we can do more for less.How can you innovate from within? How can you build that internal smart engine to be more efficient and effective rather than try and add more resources to your mix? It is something that most of the industry peers that I’ve been speaking to or meeting with have been talking about the constraints that they have from a budget or resources perspective, but still the requirement to push the boundaries and increase what they’ve been doing with less.

How do you see AI playing out in MarTech over the next 12 months?

Amin: Look, AI for me has been playing a pivotal role for a while. I think the construct of AI has been in existence from the day we started building machine learning models.It’s not something new.The difference nowadays is the concept ofbeing generative AI, so moving into more reactive and responsive style activity and automated.It’s not that we’ve never been doing it. I think if we can overcome the fear as an industry or tech leaders of what the risks are, it can actually be playing a pivotal role across the board.It can help with driving those efficiencies, allowing you to kind of use it from an evergreen perspective for some of the content stuff that we do.It should allow us to personalise at scale because we no longer will be restricted with time anymore.But it will also allow a lot of innovation if we let it.It will allow people to whomight be nontechnical, non specialist individuals to experience and trial things differently.But it does require a bit of still that concept of human intervention.It’s not something that will stop roles from being required.It’s still the human expertise is still required to make sure that moderation is in place.And you’re not saying things that are not within your brand, but I guess allows more creativity if we let it.

What are you most excited about to be running a session focusing on finding the balance between CX and MarTech?

Amin: Well, I think the biggest part of excitement is the fact that people don’t think of CX when they come and think of Martech. And a lot of times people tend to let the technology drive the solution and the strategy rather than the other way around. We all talk about being audience centric, but for some reason when we come to implement, we become technology centric. This is kind of trying to drive a conversation in a different manner of showing how you can bridge the gap between the two elements and how you can use your technology to power or deliver against what you’re trying to do for your audiences in a more audience led way. For example, being able to use AI to create variations of content based on research that you’ve done for your audiences to identify their key motivations for study and actually just allowing yourself to integrate the two, the insights into the content and then deliver it through personalisation and targeting. But even thinking about it more broadly, it’s actually how do you look at what you do from a personalisation and the key attributes or behaviours that you look for to identify the potential motivations that you’ve identified that an individual is actually telling you that’s why they do what they do. So it’s actually being smarter with how you infuse the two together rather than just letting the technology guide your decisions.

How should leaders start thinking differently in order to begin treating CX and MarTech the right way?

Amin: Well, for one, try to break the technology, push it to its limits. Everyone sells you the dream. Well, let’s try and achieve that dream. Don’t just listen to what they say and try and actually achieve it. So when we come and purchase technologies, we usually get solved. The silver bullet. It will solve all of our problems. Now, it’s not necessarily untrue. Does it require customisation? Does it require development? Sometimes, yes. And that’s absolutely fine. But it also requires creative solutioning. Just think differently about how you’re trying to tackle the problem. Like, for example, we know for Monash we have a few motivations for our students, especially our postgraduate students. Cost is one. So they’re motivated by cost and making sure that it’s well, for some markets, they will sometimes select which university they go to based on affordability.

One of the simplest ways to do the affordability piece is to give discounts. Any industry does discounts in different ways. So you can give scholarships, you can give grants, anything like that, but that’ s at the tail end of the process.So it’s only when the person has come through the line and you kind of throw that carrot at the end of the process. How about if we change our content from the beginning of the process when we start seeing a person, for example, visiting our website and looking at all the scholarship sections of the website, or constantly looking at the fees and charges for the courses, well, you can assume that there is some cost sensitivity there somewhere. It could be positive or negative. So not necessarily always negative. They just could be interested. But knowing that insight and gathering that attribute for an individual, you can then shift your dialogue to be a little bit more about cost rather than just about the course. Because obviously, if the person has repeatable actions around seeing the same course over and over again, well, we know what they’re interested in.

But it’s now about that tail end of the process of going, all right, they’re obviously comparing us to others. So how can you show all of the other unique selling points that you have and even around cost that you can give that audience member? So using attributes and metrics that you see behaviourally on your audiences in a smart way to link it to their motivations.

What are you most looking forward to about the MarTech symposium?

Amin: Well, for me, it’s actually meeting with similar thought leaders in the tech industry and learning from what they’re doing in their space and seeing how I can apply some of these learnings across my space as well and networking with people.There’s a lot of brilliant individuals out there in the industries that do amazing kind of, as I said, creative solutioning or creative problem solving things, that this is a great opportunity to just be in one place altogether and actually have those discussions openly.

Which afternoon activity will you be going to at the symposium?

Amin: Well, surprisingly for everyone, although I did use terms like creativity quite a few times, but even though I’m an analyst by background and we’re obviously heavily in the geeky space of marketing, but I actually will attend the Paint and Sip, I love drawing session.

Marketing Tech Symposium, 12-13 September 2023, will bring together 150+ of the most influential MarTech leaders from ANZ’s leading organisations to discuss the next generation of MarTech, collaborate, share ideas, and stay on top of the industry’s latest game changers.