JULY 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY ViewMATT MOBLEY, CTO, MERKLEThe Race to Unify: Using Marketing Technology to Drive Intelligence into Marketing Decisionsdecisions today that will limit their ability to capitalize on the intelligence revolution to come.Marketing organizations have started the shift to consumer centricity. In almost every organization, you hear conversations about how to make each unique consumer the focal point of business decisions: which product, which message, or which color to use. The challenge with this consumer-centric strategy is that marketing organizations are not being bold enough or moving fast enough to establish competitive advantage. Legacy alignment to he market is swelling with cleverly named platforms that are loaded to the gills with algorithms, like Watson, Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and Einstein. These tools are starting to push the boundaries of how humans make decisions and interact. For businesses, they are laying the ground work for driving intelligence into every business decision, creating efficiency and optimizing outcomes. And for marketing in particular, they are beginning to allow us to have the most relevant and contextual conversations at virtually any point of interaction with a consumer. For marketing, we can imagine a day when a machine whirs in some distant room, exploring and calculating data on every consumer engagement with the goal of aligning, in real-time, a single, relevant, and contextual message to that consumer. And as a result of that message, the consumer is compelled to transact with the brand. The problem with all of this is not the fact that these capabilities will take awhile to mature. The issue lies in the fact that marketing organizations are making T
< Page 7 | Page 9 >