We recently spoke with Natalie Robb, founder of the DC Marketing Tech Talks Community, to learn more about the Marketing Tech Magnified conference. All marketers deal with some level of martech, and we think you might be interested in attending!
I recently spoke with Natalie Robb, Chief Market Analyst at WaveLength Analytics and founder of the DC Marketing Tech Talks Community to learn more about the community’s March 15th conference, Marketing Tech Magnified. All marketers deal with some level of martech, and we think you might be interested in attending.
Angela: What’s the background on MarTech Magnified 2019?
Natalie: This year will be our 3rd year hosting MarTech Magnified, which will be held on Friday, March 15th in Arlington, VA. It’s a project of the DC Marketing Tech Talks Community and that started in 2015. The community, which is local and DC-based, started as a response to challenges inherent in the growing and shifting marketing technology landscape. There are so many platforms and point solutions and it’s still growing! It’s a huge challenge for marketers to choose, optimize, and leverage so many marketing technology solutions.
Obviously, it intersects with my personal career story as a marketer for technology companies. I was always on the lookout for tools that could help me do my job better. After a while, I found opinions and advice from other marketers essential to choosing and using all these MarTech tools.
So MarTech Magnified is a distinctly different conference because it is vendor-agnostic. In addition, only our peers, who are high quality and well-known marketing practitioners – the ones the DC MarTech Talks community wants to learn from – are presenters and panelists. Unlike many marketing technology conferences, MarTech Magnified does not have any vendor influence.
A: Why did MarTech Magnified choose the theme of “MarTech, Data, and the Marketing Mix”
N: This theme is chosen for a few reasons. First, there’s been a big reliance on the email channel in recent years and the email channel is getting more difficult. Obviously, GDPR plays a role, but so does deliverability. It’s harder to get to the inbox than ever before and when you do, engagement and click-through rates are not as great as they once were.
The second reason for the MarTech Magnified 2019 theme is rooted in the first reason. Marketers need to expand and optimize the marketing mix. The key to that goal is to take good advantage of all that marketing data coming from all corners of marketing – marketing automation, customer relationship management, website analytics, social, ad tech, content attribution, and even PR tech.
And finally, we feel our own exhaustion over the execution of marketing at the expense of thoughtfulness and creativity. We know we’re not alone and many feel the same way. So we’re excited to inspire our fellow marketers to come back to the core of marketing, remember that MarTech is a set of tools and not a strategy, and that both strategy and MarTech together make the marketing magic.
The MarTech Magnified agenda stays true to our community and theme. One panel talks about MarTech solutions outside the core stack. Another discusses striking the right mix of inbound and outbound marketing. Raman Tallamraju, VP of Architecture – Marketing and Distribution from T. Rowe Price will talk about marketing data infrastructure and how data supercharges your marketing. David Young, VP of Demand Generation at K12 will talk about how they use marketing mix modeling. Lorraine Joseph, Director of Business Discovery of Unanet talks about how you build high performing business development teams.
A: What’s the story on MarTech Magnified’s keynote?
N: This answer is two-fold. We wanted a marketing leader who felt the same way and is actively working on ways to overcome the challenges that automation created. So we’re really excited to hear from Nick Panayi, the VP of Global Brand, Digital Marketing and Demand Generation at DXC Technology.
And of course, there’s a backstory: We scheduled a call with Nick around Thanksgiving, and didn’t have that call until shortly before Christmas. During that initial call, Nick sent us his LinkedIn blog he wrote in the interim called, GDPR, Yes Please! In his important blog, he contends that we’ve wasted too much time and money on email marketing to massive lists of people who just aren’t interested in our products. We knew we had our perfect keynoter!
Nick’s keynote titled Take Back Control! Marketing May Require Some Thinking After All, reflects the current state of marketing today. In many ways, automation had made marketing more transactional, hyper- focused on quantities of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and less strategic. We’ve lost some of our market and customer focus, which leads to new limitations, of course. Nick is going to talk about how to balance automation and thoughtful planning to be more effective.
A: MarTech Magnified has a lightning round of some of the area’s best marketing campaigns called Campaigns of Staggering Genius. How did you choose them?
N: We searched high and low to find great campaigns. We put a call out to peers running great, or genius, campaigns and we also created a contest
Genius has no boundaries or definitions. But genius campaigns stand out in some way – novel creative, compelling content, innovative use of a new technology, brilliant marketing channel mix, and of course, achieved goals with great results.
Among 20 or so nominations, we chose a campaign mix from DC area marketers and companies based on budget size – whether it was Mega, Medium, or Mini. The mini budget campaign is from SalsaLabs in partnership with Webmechanix, and the mega budget campaign is from GE Power. Medium budget campaigns are from Upside Business Travel, Fidelis Cybersecurity, and Phone2Action. The session is run by Amir Zonozi, the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of Zoomph, so he knows a lot about marketing campaigns, as well. Taken together, these campaigns of staggering genius showcase DC’s talented marketers – and will certainly spark fresh ideas for everyone.
A: MarTech Magnified ends with an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Panel. How did you choose panelists?
N: Many marketers who grew up in the era of automation have never seen the more strategic side. We think the conference will be very eye-opening for younger marketers. So we searched to find the best panelists who are strong in both automation and strategy. In addition, we needed seasoned experts that can bring a huge range of experiences and can think quickly.
We’re really excited for this eclectic panel of truly superior DC area leaders. Jumanah Anter, currently the SVP of Global Demand Gen at Mastercard is formerly of Facebook, Microsoft, and many other leading brands. Charles Gold is a serial Chief Marketing Officer – currently of Atomicorp– who is aptly named because every security startup he leads turns to gold. In addition, Charles is the 2017 the Washington Business Journal CMO of the Year. Jill Lynn is the Head of Sales for The Trunk Club, which was a startup that was bought by Nordstrom, so she brings the sales perspective. Finally, D.P. Venkatesh is the Digital Engagement Leader for Cisco. He came to them via acquisitions; first, as CEO his company got bought by Broadsoft, second, when he was VP of Marketing at Broadsoft, they were bought be Cisco.
Together, our Ask Me Anything panelists bring an extraordinary wealth of experience that no matter the question, they’ll have great answers. It’s the perfect way to end an unforgettable MarTech Magnified where marketers come away with new MarTech advice, fresh marketing ideas, and new friends.
Thanks for today’s interview and we’re very happy to have the AMADC as a media partner for MarTech Magnified 2019. We’re thrilled to extend a special discount code to your members AMADC and look forward to collaborating to make world-class DC area creators and marketers well-known!
See you at MarTech Magnified!
About MarTech Magnified 2019
Now in its third year, Marketing Tech Magnified 2019 is a DC-area conference where tech-savvy marketers come together to learn about key trends, new technologies, and industry benchmarks. Organized by the region’s leading marketing technology community DC Marketing Tech Talks, this annual conference provides a unique forum to share technology experiences across all marketing and advertising channels.
Save your seat now! AMADC members should use the discount code AMADC to save 10%.