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.

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

Scott: 2023 is clearly the year of AI. Everyone’s talking about it. There’s been some incredible developments, just the pace of new things coming out around generative AI in particular. It’s been a bit of a rush, actually. It feels like almost every week we’re seeing new progress and announcements. And so I think for marketers, there’s just this tremendous, this desire to understand, okay, what’s real, what’s hype? How should we be thinking about applying this within our function today in the short term horizon, but also a lot of questions about like, okay, given the progression, the speed of the progression that’s happening, how do we think marketing is going to change over the next year or two, and what do we need to do to prepare for that?

How do you see the closing of the gap between the progression of technology and the rate of human evolution in adapting to that technology?

Scott: Definitely a challenge in some ways. I feel like AI can both help with this as well as creating other challenges of its own. The way in which I feel it can help is we’ve already been in a state where the pace of development in technology, particularly in marketing, Martech, has been incredible. I mean, Martech is just such a vast and dynamic and complex field at this point that’s actually really hard for individuals and organisations to even be able to get their arms around it. And this is actually one of the things where I feel like AI can help, because there’s a big part of what AI is able to do of understand a very broad and diverse environment. We see this with things like ChatGPT from like a text perspective. But there’s versions of generative AI that are helping us understand all the data that exists inside our company and let us ask English language questions and the AI figures out how to map it and get, if not the perfect answer every time. Getting pretty good answers. So I think AI is really going to help us be able to perhaps get our arms around just this incredible scope, that we scope creep, if you will, that we’ve seen in marketing and Martech.

That being said, there’s another dimension to AI too, which is, because it’s advancing so fast, it’s just really hard for us to predict what is the impact going to be on a variety of different careers, particularly once we start taking the horizon of like, five years or ten years? Will the nature of work and what things humans do and what things we actually turn over to machines do? There’s a lot of big open questions and so that obviously goes beyond the scope of marketing and Martech and is much larger societal challenges I think we’re going to face, but I fall in the camp of being optimistic about that. I think this is going to take us into a level where, yeah, there’s going to be a whole bunch of new challenges, but the potential productivity, the potential innovation that can be unlocked here is also going to open up new pathways for how we grow goodness definitely not.

How many tech stacks are there on your technology landscape now? (And have you memorized them all?)

Scott: Goodness definitely not. If you quiz me, I will fail miserably, because at this point, there are over 11,000 MarTech solutions that we tracked on the map we published back here in May. And I know we didn’t even cover all of them. I know this because we keep hearing from people that somehow we had missed and new products are continually arising. This is one of the things we’re seeing with AI right now is there’s like a whole new wave of products that are taking advantage of these AIs, APIs to build new products and new capabilities. So it is a very vast landscape. If you’re one of those people who’s like, how does anybody keep track of all this stuff? I assure you, I’m not able to keep track of it either. It is a big, wide MarTech world out there.

How do you foresee the shaping of privacy concerns in the context of artificial intelligence?

Scott: So I think it’s actually really interesting to think about. We’ve got this collision between AI and all the innovation that’s happening that opens up this ability to leverage all this content and leverage all this data and turn it into, take raw materials there and turn them into any sort of wonderful creation that a marketer can dream of. It’s all very exciting, but it alsoraises a lot of thorny questions.

I mean, first of all, from just the data perspective, even before AI, we were wrestling with how should regulation evolve to make sure that we’re respecting people’s privacy, their preferences? What is the right balance between how consumers and companies should be exchanging data and using that data to mutual benefit? And where the line is, where, okay, this is no longer mutual.So I don’t think AI changed that, but it did accelerate it because as we were talking earlier, AI makes it easier for us to put data to use more productively. So it definitely puts a spotlight on, like, okay, well, what data are we using? Do we have the permission for that? Is the use case in which we’re applying that data?Is that meeting the expectations of what consumers, customers would want? So there’s that side of it.

And then, of course, AI. We’ve got a whole other set of questions around these large models that train themselves on content out there on the web or content that is collected from a company and the way it engages with customers. And yeah, what are questions around copyright and ownership and IP and what is fair use, what isn’t? These questions are not resolved at this point. Right? There is active debate happening in legislation across the world. And so I think this is one of the reasons why, from a marketer’s perspective, you have to stay pretty attuned to this because this is not a finalised environment yet. This is something where, okay, things are changing. You’re going to have to try things, but you might have to be prepared to adapt, be very agile, very responsive into what the new requirements and regulations become.

How should people start thinking about the MarTech super collision?

Scott: I think what gets me excited about the MarTech Super Collision, these three different trends of what’s changing at the data layer, what’s changing in the ability for us to compose, workflows and experiences and then certainly generative AI it’s not that, it’s just like, oh, this is some net new set of challenges that we have to figure out, in addition to all of the other challenges that we already had, could we stack one more thing on top of the pile we have to figure out? But what really excites me about these things is they are new approaches to addressing and solving some of the existing challenges we already have.

Again, one of the challenges that has plagued marketers for the past two decades is managing this ever expanding universe of data. And what’s the data quality and where are the data standards, and how do we resolve conflicts across different data through the how do we integrate this data? I mean, all these data challenges we have, this is not new. I mean, marketers have been wrestling with this increasingly these past two decades, but I think things like this universal data layer that’s starting to emerge and things like these generative AI tools that are helping us get a greater insight and control over this just incredible span of data. These become things that are actually going to help us solve some of our gnarliest challenges right now. So, I mean, yes, you still have to learn about I mean, these are new things for us to learn, but they are very directly of value to us because they become possible solutions to the challenges we’re already struggling with.

How would you describe yourself in three words?

Scott: Passionate about MarTech.

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

Scott: Well, as we’ve been talking here about, there’s just so much for marketers to learn and discover, and one of the best ways to learn that is to engage with your peers. I am so happy in the post Pandemic era that we’ve now finally come to here, that we’re able to get back together with our peers in person and have this sort of, like, learning and discussion and debate that’s just been very hard to reproduce in a purely virtual environment. So really looking forward to spending time with some amazing marketers and marketing ops leaders.

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

Scott: Well, seeing as I have never been to the Hunter Valley before and it is renowned for its wine, I think I’m going to have to either do the wine tasting thing or at the very least, the paint and sip.

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.