Veteran martech technical architect Jep Castelstein has some challenging views on where the space is headed. If he’s right, then stand by for upheaval in the martech stack, and likely in marketing ops as well.

He predicts, for instance, that future marketing automation and email platforms will not have databases. He plausibly points out that duplication of data (probably partial and inconsistent duplication at that) in the CRM and in a data warehouse, as well as in MA and email platforms is redundant. Castelstein doesn’t explicitly mention CDPs, but certainly the concept of a CDP as a single source of truth seems inconsistent with a series of additional data silos.

As for the CRM, Castelstein predicts it will cease to be the center of the sales and marketing universe, for the good reason that it doesn’t typically house invaluable, timely intent and product usage data.

Read more predictions here.

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Cross-channel marketing platform Iterable has released data on how B2C marketers have responded to 2020’s big consumer push to have brands earn their trust. Based on interviews with 500 U.S. and U.K. marketers, the survey found:

• 87% changed their marketing strategies to better build consumer trust;
• 47% of brands issued statements on racial inequality, 40% on public health;
• Around a third of brands also issued statements on gender inequality and LGBTQIA pride;
• While around half of respondents thought their brands could do more on social issues, 83% thought brands should remain politically neutral.

Why we care. Things have changed. These results would have been unthinkable two or three years ago, and there’s an indication that the pandemic is not the sole driver of these changes: brands felt an even greater need to address race. It’s also interesting to note that social activism is not equated with taking a political side.

In case you missed it, Pat Maigler, a marketing strategy and operations manager at Williams-Sonoma, in an episode of MarTech Live, identified the same redundancy in multiple data silos as Jep Castelstein (see above). But he drew the opposite conclusion.

Marketers generally already have “their own purpose-built endpoint systems,” he said. “I’m not sure that a lot of CDPs will replace the email engines that are being used. If you’re already using somebody like LiveRamp as an onboarder, and they’re syndicating to Google, Facebook, Pinterest and other partners, well — what do I really need?”

In other words, if the databases within your marketing automation and email engines lets you do your job, why rock the boat?

Read more here.

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