Podcast recap: Future of Marketing

The Future of Marketing is already here and marketing leaders are set to change the status quo in the coming three to five years. In this season of Bold Stories. Future Focused., host Jo Richardson (Director of Corporate Communications at Pegasystems) met with marketing experts from across industries to talk about what to expect for the future of marketing and how to stay ahead.
This season covers a variety of topics ranging from utilizing meaningful MarTech methods and exploring the wild west of Web 3, to building out dynamic real-time customer engagement and ushering in a new generation of tech-savvy consumers.

Episode 1: Decluttering the future of marketing technologies ft. David Steuer and Jeremy Woodlee

In this episode, Jo Richardson speaks with two experts from Accenture about how to make aggressive moves in marketing that matter, without drowning in the tech itself. Third-party cookies are out and marketers are relying on customer data platforms (CDPs) for contextual marketing to bolster existing customer relationships overall.

David Steuer (Managing Director for Accenture’s Intelligent Software Engineering Services) talks about the importance of bringing together the art and science of marketing to achieve improved personalization. By uniting the science of data collection and analysis with the creativity of messaging, marketers can make relevant and contextual connections with all consumers.

“You still need the art, right? You still need the creative. It has to be there, but now we’re talking about needing to combine creative with data analytics and understanding of the customer context in their journey in real-time.”

Episode 2: Making content count with automated marketing experiences ft. LaToya Shambo and Morgan Short

Marketing organizations seem to be pushing out endless streams of offers, sales, updates, etc. This is overwhelming for consumers who are bombarded with marketing offers and for marketing teams trying to keep the content machine running. But, there are solutions for marketers to become focused and stand out.

LaToya Shambo (Founder and CEO of Black Girl Digital) talks with Jo Richardson about the benefits of influencer marketing to connect directly with relevant consumers and audiences. Marketers must take the time to understand their audience and work out a content plan from there.

"The opportunity is there. It’s just a matter of who on your team understands the audience that you’re trying to connect with. And then, what’s the content going to look like? What’s the cadence of that content going to look like from a day-to-day perspective?”

Morgan Short (Director of Content and Web Strategy for Vendavo) talks about the confusion around storytelling because companies often don’t know who they are or how to tell their story. Without that, they can’t effectively reach their consumers and they certainly won’t stand out in a crowd. Though we often say “marketing organizations” and “consumers,” we are talking about individual and unique people. Successful storytelling should be empathetic, human, and unique.

"There was a gap for a lot of companies. They didn’t know how to tell their story. [...] But it’s also allowed companies to take a stand and to show empathy through their storytelling and their narrative...not to just add to the buzz, but to add something actually unique.”

Episode 3: Reenergize your MarTech strategies with ethical AI ft. Tara DeZao and Michelle Ngome 

Marketing organizations often promote offers and deals to their consumer bases such as a free week of internet service or a discount at your favorite store if you get three friends to join their newsletter. However, in today’s noisy marketplace, consumers aren’t interested in these offers and marketers are struggling to connect in real and genuine ways.

Tara DeZao (Director of Product Marketing in AdTech and Martech for Pegasystems) talks to Jo Richardson about how utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive learning models to achieve real-time and dynamic interactions. This enables marketers to understand consumers as the humans they are, not as static screenshots of something they liked at one moment in time.

"...AI has adaptive and predictive learning and modeling baked in...it can help marketers do really, truly one-to-one personalized engagements.”

Michelle Ngome (Marketing Consultant with Line 25 Consulting and Founder of the African American Marketing Association) believes that if marketing teams make the time and effort to focus on a variety of demographics rather than generalizing large groups of people, they can understand how nuanced individuals can be even though they may share commonalities such as location or social media activities.

"...what effort are you going to put behind yourself and your team to find this other demographic to reach? Because, yes, everyone is on Instagram, everyone is scrolling, but we’re still so siloed...”

Episode 4: Web 3.0 is brand new virtual territory. Are you prepared? ft. Emily Rose Dallara and Bridget Greenwood

Marketing organizations are always trying to see what’s next on the horizon for technology and how consumers are inevitably going to shift and grow. Enter Web 3.

Web 3 is changing the way we see and understand the marketing landscape where you can build, market, and sell in a whole new way. In this episode, Jo Richardson and our guest speakers talk about what Web 3 does and how both organizations and consumers can thrive with it.

Bridget Greenwood (Founder of Bigger Pie) talks about the importance of democratization being at the core of what all marketers do. With the rise of virtual worlds and new generations of tech-savvy users, companies must ensure that their communications and offers are accessible and safe.

“What we choose to do with that technology is really going to be whether or not we are building for a few or are building to democratize access to many more people...we should be building with democratization at the core of what we’re doing.”

Emily Rose Dallara (CMO for SL2 Capital and Advisor for Life Ties) emphasizes the importance of building genuine communities and genuine products for Web 3. Emily is building out a metaverse with a gamified racing component. This virtual experience enables users to buy and build their own cars, compete with others, and buy land for racing events. This subversive experience, and others across Web 3, are focused on providing as much as possible for all types of participants.

"Web 3 marketing is really about community building, and it’s about ownership.”