Marketing Art & Science

The week in ad tech

This week the digital and marketing universe converged on the east coast for Internet Week New York, and boy did they ever converge. Of the dozens of high-profile events, among the more interesting was the AdAge Marketing and Technology Summit. It was great to have the opportunity to sponsor this event, which featured c-level execs from IHG, GE, Nationwide and Turn sharing insights about how new levels of integration and the ability to harness data have driven improved business performance. As AdAge said of the event (Worlds Collide: The New Data-Focused CMOs and Their CIO Counterparts):

In 10 years, there will be 50 billion industrial machines connected to the internet, predicts Stephen Liguori, executive director-global innovation and new models at GE. The 123-year-old firm calls it the “industrial internet” and it’s the next wave of the consumer-focused internet of things connecting everyday products to data-collecting platforms. Mr. Liguori joined a host of other marketers to discuss the new tech- and data-driven CMO and the increasing need for CMOs to work in tandem with CIOs to manage the vast swaths of data generated in this new era.

The Next Web featured an amazing Ted Talk-like lecture by Kenneth Cukier, a journalist with The Economist, “Big data may be too hyped, but here’s how it will change the world.” He’s a very relatable speaker and he takes a complex topic – why you need to care about data and how it affects everything – and makes it compelling. Give it a view.

Investor, thinker and guru William Peng, has a great article on Medium, Technology Platforms Emerge from Information Floods. He talks about one of our favorite concepts: we now have tons of data, how are we going to get the maximum benefit from it? I think a subtler theme that comes through as well is that we have made these great technological leaps, we now have the power to shape our future – control the data, don’t let it control us. Peng writes:

Because we now have unparalleled 1) access, 2) portability, and 3) persistence of data, I think the next level of innovation is being built on the parsing of that flood of information - what are the different ways you can slice and dice that information to be more valuable? This could be what people call “big data,” but I believe this is actually a higher level macro trend of how we organize the information to be more useful to us.