Fireside chat with Scott Brinker:Digital Ops Orchestration

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Julia Nimchinski: Thank you again, Scott Brinker, I feel like you have a Ptsd. We wouldn’t do it to you this time. There will not be 10 people on your panel. I promise. Welcome to the show.

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Daniel Baddeley: Thank you. Everybody.

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Julia Nimchinski: Great to having you here, Scott. We are transitioning to a fireside chat between Scott and Allison, Scott, Vp. Of platform ecosystem at Hotspot, Martech

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Julia Nimchinski: Guru, if I can say so.

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Scott Brinker: You’re very.

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Julia Nimchinski: Allison Snow, Cmo. At String Point solutions. One of the most insightful leaders I’ve met all over these years. So yeah, let’s get started. Allison.

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing Lineup. We are 8 min already over time. So just right.

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Scott Brinker: Yeah, we’ll we’ll make the most of it.

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Julia Nimchinski: Let’s do it.

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Allison Snow: I’m so excited. You guys, in the audience, you know the Graphic, you know Skybreaker, and he is so much more than the Graphic, but that is just one association you might have with him.

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Allison Snow: The deal that I tried to make with Scott in advance was, We have an hour. Now we have a little bit less.

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Allison Snow: How much of his knowledge can we grab

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Allison Snow: in this short amount of time in terms of digital Ops? And I am very excited to to try to facilitate that as best as I can. So, Scott, we haven’t met, so I’m

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Allison Snow: super excited to meet you. I know it’s showing, so I’m not going to try to hide it.

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Allison Snow: Thanks for coming on board.

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Scott Brinker: No, thank you so much. Yeah, we. We haven’t met in person here. But we’ve been collaborating over this talk. I’m very excited about, yeah, the topics we’re gonna be diving into. So thank you so much. Yeah.

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Allison Snow: Very cool. Awesome. So I’m going to dive in because we do have some time to make up for we caught the tail end of the last session absolutely awesome like I could barely not sort of take myself off mute and contribute. But I’m I’m a good person, so I didn’t do that. I’m gonna go ahead and jump in. We we talked just a little bit as as we mentioned. We haven’t met but we talked a little bit about what we know about this audience, which is, some folks are learning about digital Ops. Orchestration

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Allison Snow: may have caught a few blog posts kind of thinking about it, scratching the surface. And others are huge experts. And we we know this from viewing these sessions before there’s just a large spectrum of knowledge here. So we’re going to start slow. Don’t let that bore you and don’t go away. But we’re just gonna talk about from Scott’s perspective and everything. He knows

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Allison Snow: what even is digital Ops orchestration.

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Scott Brinker: Well, it’s a it’s a very fancy sounding phrase, isn’t it? Oh, wow! No, you know, I don’t do like marketing automation. I do. Digital Ops orchestration. I should get a raise, you know. I mean.

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Scott Brinker: where we, you know, just to set this in context is, we’ve been doing for 30 years here this steady evolution of shifting to a world where we engage with customers through digital channels. And if there’s 1 thing that has been pretty much constant

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Scott Brinker: over these past 30 years is that environment has just gotten more complex. Right? You know, I mean, once upon a time, you could put up a website. And maybe you’d have a form. And that was our digital marketing, the extent of our digital marketing environment. And then, as more channels have come in more tactics. We’ve gotten more sophisticated in understanding different segments where they’re at in different stages in their buyer journey. And all this stuff is actually really exciting. But

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Scott Brinker: it has steadily increased the complexity of all the things that even just in the marketing world we have to deal with. Yeah, to just sort of like run a modern marketing department. And there’s only so much of that us humans can actually keep track of, you know. So one of the sort of like parallel developments that’s been happening, you know, accelerating over 1015 years is to say, Okay, we need to bring

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Scott Brinker: more and more automation to this. And you know the whole category of marketing, automation and marketing automation platforms. And you know where those began with Eloqua and Marketo and Hubspot and Pardot and you know the whole idea there was to say, like, Okay, there’s a set of things we kind of expect are going to happen.

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Scott Brinker: And now we want to set up an automated rule like a very deterministic rule, like, when X happens, Y should always happen, or you know, maybe a little decision logic like, Oh, if X happens, then we want y to happen otherwise we want Z to happen, you know. But the idea was to start to put these rules in place to say that. Okay, we don’t need humans, you know, engaging in every single one of these things.

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Scott Brinker: We can have these patterns, that sort of run on their own.

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Scott Brinker: And so that was fine when you had, like, you know, 2 or 3 or 5 of those. But, as you know, the sophistication of what we thought we could do in marketing. Automation kept growing is again the number of channels, segments. All this kept growing.

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Scott Brinker: We kept adding more and more roles.

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Scott Brinker: and that’s gotten to the place where? Yeah, I think a lot of sophisticated marketing teams struggle with just the span. You know of how many things they’re trying to automate

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Scott Brinker: in marketing. And if we step back one level and say, like, Okay, it’s 1 thing to have a marketing team doing this.

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Scott Brinker: But as more and more of every kind of touch point we have with customers is happening through digital channels. And there’s software behind the scenes that’s helping to manage those interactions. And everyone’s trying to put some automations into that we’ve got. Oh, different marketing systems running different automations. And we have sales systems and sequences that are running automations. And we might have customer service things that

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Scott Brinker: run automations. And now you start to have all these things that are running automations. But it’s the same business. And we’re engaging with the same customers. And so this really becomes one of the questions for us is like, Oh.

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Scott Brinker: okay, as you get more and more of these things, trying to engage with customers programmatically.

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Scott Brinker: how do we orchestrate them together?

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Allison Snow: I love that. And and Julia introduced this this topic on Linkedin, as you know, who’s orchestrating the orchestrators, and and you did such a good job of outlining that I think you. You said so many important things. But one thing that I really appreciate and I think the audience appreciates is a lot of sophisticated teams are struggling with this. Not just a lot of teams, but a lot of teams that are sophisticated.

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Scott Brinker: Okay.

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Allison Snow: That have

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Allison Snow: embraced multi channels. Of course, multi segments. Of course, multi attributes. It’s not. If X happens, then why, there’s a world of decisions, and I think, introducing the if X to y.

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Allison Snow: the sort of evolution to patterns to where we are now.

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Allison Snow: what a history! And this is! This is like a decade and a half right? Not like a century. Yeah, kind of interesting.

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Scott Brinker: Keeping track of all that stuff is hard. And I think that is sort of where I think of the word orchestration

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Scott Brinker: is like, okay, yeah, I love the orchestrating the orchestrators. Yeah, you know, it’s like, what’s that level that helps bring some cohesion to this. And to just be very honest like, there’s a lot of this like this is a problem more than it is a solution. And we can talk about some of the steps on the way towards a solution. But if anyone’s listening to this, and they’re feeling like, Yeah, wow, I have no idea how that’s getting done. Yeah.

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Scott Brinker: yeah, you’re basically with all the rest of us.

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Allison Snow: Yeah, but I’ll join the club. Yeah. And there’s there’s answers here. And and there’s more questions. So I think that’s really generous to acknowledge

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Allison Snow: awesome. I I wonder if you could talk a little bit about just that

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Allison Snow: you get to talk to so many companies, and while it is a challenge even for sophisticated companies. And you get to think about this so much more often in your role. What are some of the the must haves or the attributes of folks who are progressing here

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Allison Snow: really? Well.

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Allison Snow: so obviously, even sophisticated, struggling a bit. But there’s some something that must make you say, well, that’s a great start. That is a that is a great attribute. Keep doing that.

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Scott Brinker: Yeah, well, I think there’s

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Scott Brinker: technical foundations. And then there’s sort of organizational foundations. And I think at the technical foundation, if there’s 1 place to invest. That is almost always a solid return. It’s at the data level.

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Scott Brinker: you know, because all the fun things we want to do with orchestration and insights and intelligence. Really, at the end of the day the efficacy of those things is powered entirely by the data we feed into them. And it’s amazing that as marketers in today’s world, we have access to

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Scott Brinker: just a stunning array of data. You know. I mean, whether it’s, you know, the whole spectrum of 1st party data, you know, not just, you know, some of the classic 1st party data. But all this stuff happening around like behavioral data, you know, like intent signals that happen inside our world.

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Scott Brinker: But then all the sorts of data from like 3rd parties that are still a very big factor for most businesses. Certainly, even when you’re engaging them with even the walled garden platforms. And you know how you’re exchanging data with them

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Scott Brinker: for a number of companies. There’s

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Scott Brinker: what we call second party data. Right? You know, if you have partners, if you have ecosystems like how you’re aligning data there. And so to me, like the the number. One thing that marketers can do from a technical perspective is be investing in steadily maturing

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Scott Brinker: their data, infrastructure their data capability, like, okay, what are the sources of data we have. Where do we keep them? How do we manage them? How do we make sure we’re like staying compliant? You know, it’s funny. This stuff never seems like the sexy stuff. The sexy stuff is always downstream of what we do with that data. But the data is the foundation that makes that all possible.

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Scott Brinker: Yeah, I think from.

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Allison Snow: We’re talking foundations, and I think you’re giving an answer. And I think a lot of forums have a

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Allison Snow: date is good, and and you know, but but want to get to the sexy stuff just to be the sexy

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Allison Snow: person doing the.

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Scott Brinker: I mean, you know I mean.

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Allison Snow: Martha, Margaret.

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Scott Brinker: You know we’re entitled to a little bit of that. But.

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Allison Snow: So it’s it’s the answer, right? A stunning amount of data, making decisions about how stunning that is, and and what you really need, and how you play. It is huge.

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Scott Brinker: We can probably later on get into. Yeah, you know, some of the more interesting things happening at the data layer, like, you know, lots of discussions around the world of cdps and how they’re evolving lots of discussions around things like cloud data, warehouse data, lake house things. But

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Scott Brinker: the other thing, I would say from a foundational perspective is organizationally, really investing in your marketing Ops function, you know. And this is something that I think still, a lot of companies underinvest in, you know, I come across so many marketing Ops functions marketing Ops people who they’re just like stretched

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Scott Brinker: far too thin. You know, the list of things I have to do is like 10 miles long. It’s just it’s

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Scott Brinker: there’s so much leverage to be had with this technology. But it’s funny there was a Gartner survey that they’ve run every year for, like the past 4 or 5 years, where, they would ask, you know, their enterprise marketers. How much of your Martech stack do you think you’re utilizing.

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Scott Brinker: you know, and not a lot of definition to what is meant by utilization? So it’s kind of a gut feel thing, you know. Take it with a grain of salt. But, like the 1st year they did that about 4 or 5 years ago the answer came back, and most people said, Well, it’s about 60% which actually was kind of depressing. You’re like, wait a second. You’ve got all this marketing technology. And you’re only using about 60% of it, you better get on that. And then the next year it dropped to 50%.

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Scott Brinker: And then the year after that it dropped to 40%. And then, like the last year that they ran this, it dropped down to 33%, which I mean, if if you’re looking for a signal of saying like, Hey, there’s a crisis in the Martech stack.

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Scott Brinker: I

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Scott Brinker: I think that’s about as clear of a signal. If you can get like, you know, danger will Robinson. And ultimately, like the way I look at that is, the technology has raced so far ahead of our organizational capacity to actually apply it and apply it in a way that you know, we feel we’re getting value out of that. Yeah, I mean most organizations. Like, yeah, we’re just using a fraction of what’s possible.

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Scott Brinker: I think the cure to that is in a very broad sense investment in marketing operations. And that being said, marketing operations isn’t just about designing a tech stack. It isn’t about just having the Admin folks who can like, you know, configure the systems, and, you know, make sure this is running, and, you know, get the reports. I mean, that’s a part of marketing Ops. But an often under

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Scott Brinker: recognized opportunity with marketing Ops is to have them really lead the enablement and empowerment for the rest of the marketing organization. In how you take advantage of these tools. You know, there are so many of these things that yeah, basically, people

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Scott Brinker: don’t have any idea of what’s possible. They’re not really given. It’s more than just training. It’s even being given like the opportunity and the permission to like start to experiment, to push things forward that yeah, they’ve just sort of like, oh, all right, there’s these handful of things we do. We’ll keep doing those. Yeah. In theory. There’s all this other stuff we could do. I saw a really cool demo of it from the vendor. But yeah, we’re not going to get to that that time.

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Scott Brinker: and we’ve got to invest in that. If we really want to take full advantage of sort of what this whole digital Ops orchestration future could be.

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Allison Snow: Yeah, I I noted how you how you qualified the Gartner survey gut feel not exactly precise language, but man, that is, that is directionally clear, as you say.

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Allison Snow: It’s not as what I’d expect in terms of the increasing, you know passion about

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Allison Snow: efficiency that I feel like has been. You know that we have gotten more efficient, I hope, and that’s been the tune of the last 2 or 3 years, I think. And then

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Allison Snow: but but that confidence in the Martech kind of sinking. That’s

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Allison Snow: interesting thing to talk about a different time. Perhaps I know.

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Scott Brinker: Yeah, I mean, there is one way to think of that that you know. So I have this thing. I drew on a napkin like. 10 years ago we called Martek’s Law. I wasn’t trying to name it after myself. I was trying to name it after marketing tech people who run into this. And it’s this idea that technology generally changes at an exponential rate. Right? You know, Moore’s law is sort of the foundation of that. We see exponential change.

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Scott Brinker: Organizations do not change exponentially. If you’re going to take a swag at it, we maybe change at a logarithmic pace. Change is very, very hard, particularly the larger you get. You juxtapose these 2 curves against each other and the technology just continuing to raise ahead and organizations struggling to adapt.

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Scott Brinker: And you can have it. Both be the case that the organization is evolving.

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Scott Brinker: you know. So it is getting better. It is getting more efficient. It is finding, you know new ways to drive innovation. But oh, thanks, hey, cool! This is such a cool thing to like have slides automatically come up based on topic. You know, but at the same time feel that like, Wow, relative to what’s actually possible out here.

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Scott Brinker: we’re just falling further and further behind.

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Allison Snow: fascinating before I lose the opportunity. I want to make sure that folks picked up on your lost in space reference and appreciate it as much as they should Scott. So Google it if you need to.

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Allison Snow: But but don’t want to let that go. I’m gonna jump a little bit get us back on topic, because I took you away a little bit.

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Allison Snow: Shame on me

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Allison Snow: any recommendations for how folks who are saying I’m in. I want to do this. I want to be super sophisticated. What are some indicators of? If I’m doing it well? Another way to say that is.

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Allison Snow: any insights or recommendations on how to measure digital Ops orchestration.

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Scott Brinker: Yeah, that’s actually a really great question. It’s a hard one to answer, because a lot of this stuff is not

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Scott Brinker: like, it’s hard to get a direct measure of somehow, like orchestration efficiency. I mean, you could put things like how many total

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Scott Brinker: like in the in the abstract is a universal metric. It’s just kind of hard, you know. But what we look at is we look at. Okay. We’ve got all these things we’re actually doing. You know, what are we doing? As far as like the time? I mean, if you say if you’re in b 2 b, you know, and you’ve got a certain timeframe between, like, you know, a set of intent signals and a lead, you know, qualifying and then actually getting them engaged, you know, with a salesperson like.

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Scott Brinker: What’s the timeframe in which that takes? What’s the conversion rate, you know, in which those people feel like they’re getting the right things moved at the right time to move forward. These are actually all very concrete. You know, metrics that we actually do care about, you know, throughout our business.

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Scott Brinker: And the whole reason we’re investing in this technology and this sort of orchestration around it is to impact those metrics. And so I think it’s very useful to from a orchestration operations perspective to say, okay, again, let’s just understand.

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Scott Brinker: like the full set of things, of what is marketing responsible for executing. What are the metrics, you know, at each of those things that actually matters to the business. Now we come up with a set of hypotheses as to okay, where’s their friction? Or where are these things that are slowing down? Or where are opportunities to like impact that and that then with those theses hypotheses, then we’re looking to say, like, Okay.

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Scott Brinker: you know, here’s what we’d like to try to see if we can make that better. And do we have the technology that can actually execute on that. There’s this other dimension of, you know.

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Scott Brinker: cost right? Because to get to the Roi, it’s like, Okay, well, yes, I can move these metrics. But how much do I have to spend to actually move that metric? You know matters? And that’s

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Scott Brinker: harder and harder these days, because

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Scott Brinker: when we’re talking about point solutions right? Like, Oh, I have a certain reaction speed to customer complaints coming at me on social media channels. Okay, I invest in a social media management tool, and I’m paying that much for it. And now I have this sort of impact on the metrics of response rate and customer attention like, that’s sort of an easy case. You’re like, Okay, I can. I can track the Roi. But when you start doing these things like.

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Scott Brinker: for instance, investing in a customer in a cloud data, warehouse architecture, so that we can have data flow across, you know, not just the different silos from, you know, classic marketing apps, but like flow across the organization. So that when things are happening in customer service, or if things are happening in a digital product like that, data is able to flow and be accessible in what we do with marketing programs and marketing campaigns.

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Scott Brinker: That’s harder. Because, you know, the investment we’re putting in that cloud data warehouse is like serving a whole bunch of needs for a whole bunch of different people. So the Roi is harder to track on those things, but certainly from a

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Scott Brinker: like top line metric of being able to say, like, Okay, you know, I’ve got a certain yeah. Again, just say it’s like a customer service resolution. You know thing, it’s got a certain timeframe, a certain success rate. Here’s what I’m gonna do to impact those metrics. And the fact that I am using. Perhaps that cloud data warehouse layer is one of the components of how I address that. Then I’m at least giving some sort of attribution, if not a very, if that’s somewhat hand, wavy attribution.

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Allison Snow: Yeah.

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Scott Brinker: To its contribution.

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Allison Snow: I think that’s so clever because I I think that.

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Allison Snow: And and thinking through these questions, I sort of suspected people know how to measure stuff. Right? That’s always. At least, I think that. And we’re always observing conversations where people talk about that. But isn’t the answer. What you just said, which is, you have a set of metrics you already care about customer response time, you know, being efficient in the martek stack, feeling more than 30% confident that it’s that it’s used all of these things. And and you’re going to make the investments in improving those metrics. It doesn’t mean that this concept of digital Ops needs its own

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Allison Snow: family of metrics. It just means, is it relevant to the metrics that you’re going after, anyway?

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Scott Brinker: 100%.

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Allison Snow: I think that’s right.

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Scott Brinker: I mean, I’m sure, like you know, I I don’t know too many marketers who are like, you know, I’m feeling like I don’t have enough metrics. I’m keeping track of right now. You recommend a few more.

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Allison Snow: And I think it’s a a forehead wipe for a lot in our audience who who are thinking? You know. I thought that maybe Scott would give me 5 more metrics on my list. But really I know what the business needs. So I’m

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Allison Snow: I’m really pleased with that. There’s a question that I was going to ask you later. But you got to give the people what they want, and they are asking

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Allison Snow: where does it live?

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Allison Snow: Does it live in revops? Does it live? Now? Obviously, there’s going to be organizational differences. So you can decide to answer that as what you observe and and sort of how you would build an organization.

532
01:56:15.560 –> 01:56:19.086
Scott Brinker: Yeah, what? A great fun question. Okay,

533
01:56:19.970 –> 01:56:31.346
Scott Brinker: of course, the consultant answer applies. It depends. But you’ve given me an opening to something I’m very, very passionate about. So just bear with me on a moment here.

534
01:56:32.600 –> 01:57:01.740
Scott Brinker: For years we’ve talked about a phrase called big data. Right? What was big data. It was like, oh, my goodness, we’re now in this world where we’re going to have just an enormous volume of data. It’s got enormous variety. It’s coming at us in a high velocity, you know, and for a good 10 year period in the early mid, 2 thousands through, you know. Like, yeah, just the last decade like this was a big topic, I mean, like, you know, any article you were going to read in the industry. You know you had a 50 50 chance of, you know, big data coming up as part of it.

535
01:57:02.050 –> 01:57:20.669
Scott Brinker: We don’t talk about that as much anymore, not because it’s completely solved. But because we’ve actually kind of got our head around that now. And actually, you know, this ability to have enormous amounts of data flowing into our organization, the infrastructure and the capabilities for that, you know just much more accessible than they were, you know, a decade and a half ago.

536
01:57:21.020 –> 01:57:34.530
Scott Brinker: To me. The challenge, though, is something I would reframe as big Ops, because now that we’ve got all this data here, the challenge we’re now running into is, we have all these different teams that are running their own little

537
01:57:34.600 –> 01:58:00.559
Scott Brinker: or automations, or Hey, now, what’s the buzzword of the week? AI agents and all this stuff that they’re all operating in the same environment on top of that data. But they aren’t necessarily coordinated. And so one of the reasons I framed this challenge of big Ops is because I feel like, Oh, we have yet to actually even get our arms around this challenge of the volume, variety and velocity of all these apps, automations, and agents.

538
01:58:00.670 –> 01:58:06.239
Scott Brinker: But there’s another interpretation of that big Ops which is from an organizational lens.

539
01:58:06.950 –> 01:58:30.890
Scott Brinker: We have marketing Ops, we have sales, Ops. We have Rev. Ops depending on the size of your company. Maybe you have web Ops, you have, you know, finance Ops. In fact, actually, I would go so far as to say, a company of any reasonable size whatever name you have for a department, you can tack the word Ops onto the end of that department name. And there’s probably someone, if not multiple people with that job.

540
01:58:30.890 –> 01:58:31.690
Allison Snow: Hr.

541
01:58:31.970 –> 01:58:48.870
Scott Brinker: Hr. Ops, right? It’s a real thing. You know. And so there’s when you like, start to like stack these things all together. You realize? Well, this is a proliferation of all these Ops roles. And what’s fascinating about them is, if you think of it as a Venn diagram.

542
01:58:48.870 –> 01:59:06.479
Scott Brinker: some like really multidimensional Venn diagram. There’s a lot of overlap, right? A lot of them are sort of orchestrating around like, okay, well, we have to make sure we’re getting the right data. We validate that data. We’re going to have a set of automations. We want some sort of like guardrails here. And this is what that team does

543
01:59:06.850 –> 01:59:20.991
Scott Brinker: now, where things get interesting is, yeah, that’s fine for each one of these things, living in their own little silo, because while they have some things in common. They have a lot of stuff that’s very contextually specific to what they’re doing.

544
01:59:21.660 –> 01:59:44.649
Scott Brinker: what we really want to do as a business, though, is, we don’t want to be operating in a million different Ops silos. We kind of want to start to converge of this idea of like, oh, no, this is just the operations of our business. This is the operations of how we engage with customers, and this is how we start to pull things together, and I would humbly suggest, you know, the movement for revops, you know, which for a lot of companies, they interpret it as like.

545
01:59:44.650 –> 01:59:52.569
Scott Brinker: okay, well, marketing Ops sales Ops customer service Ops. Like, I need to start to pull these together under, you know, some combined framework

546
01:59:52.570 –> 01:59:56.560
Scott Brinker: increasingly revops groups trying to get aligned with the finance. Ops groups.

547
01:59:56.560 –> 02:00:05.559
Scott Brinker: I think that’s wonderful, but I think the reality is for most companies. We are still in the early stages, where, like, there’s a vast

548
02:00:05.920 –> 02:00:14.610
Scott Brinker: variety of these different little Ops functions all throughout the business, and I don’t think we’ve yet come to a place where we figured out how to like.

549
02:00:14.740 –> 02:00:25.449
Scott Brinker: Should that all exist in one department? Should it all be in the Ops department? Is there a grand Ops department? Is it the it department. You know. My opinion is.

550
02:00:25.630 –> 02:00:28.949
Scott Brinker: we probably want some level of common

551
02:00:29.440 –> 02:00:49.200
Scott Brinker: organization there, but that a lot of what makes these individual Ops teams so valuable is the part of the Venn diagram that is unique to the context of what they’re trying to deliver. You know that, you know there’s no one going to be better than a marketing Ops person in really understanding the subtleties of how they’re orchestrating a specific marketing campaign.

552
02:00:51.000 –> 02:00:54.820
Allison Snow: I have expected Julia to present a Venn diagram at some point.

553
02:00:54.820 –> 02:00:58.535
Scott Brinker: But luckily this that diagram isn’t out there.

554
02:00:59.000 –> 02:01:00.139
Allison Snow: It’ll it’ll it’ll look.

555
02:01:00.140 –> 02:01:02.390
Scott Brinker: But she was probably searching for it. So kudos.

556
02:01:03.090 –> 02:01:16.409
Allison Snow: It will arrive. I love the idea of big Ops. And isn’t it funny there really is a maybe an evolution toward what you’re describing. I know that a lot of us, guilty as charged, are patting ourselves on the back still for moving to revops for saying, Hey.

557
02:01:16.510 –> 02:01:30.520
Allison Snow: that is clever. I will combine marketing and sales, and we’ll think about territory planning in the context of comp planning and in the context of our segments and and thinking, that’s really smart. So a way to go there. But a really good way to look at that decision.

558
02:01:31.180 –> 02:01:59.970
Scott Brinker: Yeah, but it is really interesting, because all the examples you gave are actually the perfect reason why you want those things combined, because there’s so much benefit to that coherence across all of that. But then, since I’m closest on the Martek side to a lot of marketing Ops teams, I hear a lot of pushback from them that like, okay, yeah. Well, revops, we agree with all those align things. But there’s all these other things that we need to do that are actually highly specific to marketing.

559
02:02:00.360 –> 02:02:18.999
Scott Brinker: And the revops leader doesn’t necessarily get that. And so I think that’s 1 of the things we’re struggling with is like, where is the balance between? You know what you combine, you know, and unify around as a model? And where is differentiation in the Ops, models actually useful, and a good thing.

560
02:02:19.180 –> 02:02:21.909
Scott Brinker: probably highly variant from one company to another.

561
02:02:21.910 –> 02:02:27.229
Allison Snow: Yes, yeah, yeah. There’s so much that goes into that, including cost. Right? I mean, centralization is efficient.

562
02:02:27.400 –> 02:02:30.309
Allison Snow: But you, you make your sacrifices on the other side. So

563
02:02:30.480 –> 02:02:39.034
Allison Snow: again, a lot of good commentary in terms of informing that decision for folks who are thinking about it, and they are. Because again those questions came in on chat

564
02:02:40.660 –> 02:02:44.319
Allison Snow: Do you have any thoughts on avoiding?

565
02:02:44.430 –> 02:02:49.710
Allison Snow: It is so consistent with what you said about the Gartner survey which we are buying into collectively here

566
02:02:49.830 –> 02:02:51.250
Allison Snow: tool sprawl.

567
02:02:51.870 –> 02:03:01.340
Allison Snow: So I I spent some time at at Forrester as analyst and talking to folks about their goals and and technology purchases. And and sometimes I would wonder.

568
02:03:02.530 –> 02:03:04.950
Allison Snow: I don’t even know if you’re ready for this. Right? So so

569
02:03:05.910 –> 02:03:14.097
Allison Snow: let’s just say we’re talking to someone about an intent vendor. You know, back in 2,016. And that’s when this was. And you would think, Okay,

570
02:03:14.560 –> 02:03:17.700
Allison Snow: But if you learn that someone’s in market.

571
02:03:18.210 –> 02:03:21.490
Allison Snow: What will you do to treat them differently? Right like, what’s your

572
02:03:21.770 –> 02:03:30.190
Allison Snow: what’s your response? What do you? You know? What are you building in terms of campaign design. There’s a lot to this, but this is just an example, a small one. Just how ready are you to adopt the tech?

573
02:03:30.320 –> 02:03:32.739
Allison Snow: And so do you feel concerned about?

574
02:03:33.200 –> 02:03:43.429
Allison Snow: I’m not saying people who bought that had tools sprawl. But I think there is a. The answer is tech. It’s tech and talent and organization as you laid out at the beginning of this, but I think the lowest hanging fruit. There is writing a check.

575
02:03:44.300 –> 02:04:02.630
Scott Brinker: Yeah, no. And I mean again not to paint all vendors with the same brush. I mean, I’m aligned with a vendor myself is, you know, I mean, I think vendors were incentivized to say, like, here’s what’s possible with this technology. And we can show you a demo. And we can tell you about this customer who did that. And this was great.

576
02:04:03.010 –> 02:04:03.790
Scott Brinker: the

577
02:04:04.420 –> 02:04:15.929
Scott Brinker: been less incentivized, I think, to say, like, Oh! And, by the way, here’s all the other things you’re going to need to do to like make this really effective. And I don’t even think this. I wouldn’t want to frame this as a conspiracy sort of thing. It’s more of just like.

578
02:04:16.100 –> 02:04:35.340
Scott Brinker: I know. A lot of like great sales reps in the Martech industry, and it is hard to be a sales rep in this industry because you have to learn so much about your product, so much about these contacts. And so I think you know a lot of great salespeople and customer success people. Even in the martek space. It was like, Okay, I can explain to the customer

579
02:04:35.570 –> 02:04:58.579
Scott Brinker: our technology and what it does, and how you take advantage of that. But boy trying to like also consult with them on like everything else they’re going to need to. Do, you know, in their organization to take full advantage of that. They just couldn’t do that. Which is why I do think like analysts, consultants, solutions, providers like huge value, you know, having these other sources. But yeah, people.

580
02:05:00.420 –> 02:05:07.921
Scott Brinker: you know you, you said it so eloquently. It’s like, Oh, I can read the check and get that because I’ve got budget. So here, let me do that.

581
02:05:08.180 –> 02:05:10.289
Allison Snow: Change is so much harder, it’s so much harder.

582
02:05:10.290 –> 02:05:15.720
Scott Brinker: Is. Yeah, you know. And you’re right about I mean tools for all. It’s funny. I always.

583
02:05:16.310 –> 02:05:27.799
Scott Brinker: I’ve always have 2 minds of that, because to me I just hate talking about the size of tech stacks as any sort of meaningful number whatsoever. Like to me

584
02:05:27.900 –> 02:05:46.689
Scott Brinker: it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 5 tools in your stack or 500 tools in your stack. What matters is okay for the technologies you have? Are you using them? Well, are you getting value out of these, you know. Are they working like? That’s all that matters like it’s almost like an occam’s razor like you want the simplest possible Martech stack

585
02:05:46.900 –> 02:06:00.040
Scott Brinker: that actually does the things that you want to need. And so while I push back on that, I also acknowledge that yeah, just the way a lot of tech stacks have gotten constructed over. Time is a lot of them are a mess.

586
02:06:00.460 –> 02:06:25.710
Scott Brinker: There’s a lot of legacy stuff. There’s a lot of overlap. I’m not entirely against overlap if there’s a useful reason for it, but there’s a lot of cases where there’s overlap that there isn’t a useful reason for it. And it’s funny. Wow, just one odd spot on that was, you know, I because I tracked this data of like size of tech stacks through some of these Saas management platforms, and it had been consolidating for the past

587
02:06:25.750 –> 02:06:36.349
Scott Brinker: 3 years like basically it spiked up, you know, with the pandemic when everyone’s like, hey? If it’s digital, let’s buy it. You know. But after that it really did start to, you know, consolidate year over year

588
02:06:36.530 –> 02:06:38.170
Scott Brinker: until last year

589
02:06:38.310 –> 02:06:48.039
Scott Brinker: where it suddenly started growing again. And as you might have imagined, why, it’s because now people are like bringing in all these new specialist AI tools to experiment with that as well.

590
02:06:48.550 –> 02:06:50.420
Allison Snow: Yeah, fascinating.

591
02:06:50.720 –> 02:07:00.480
Allison Snow: really good stuff. I definitely encourage everyone joining us to to think about that as a as a mini, simple audit in their own organizations just the concept of utilization of their own martek stack.

592
02:07:00.750 –> 02:07:03.409
Allison Snow: Older people are kind of doing that, anyway, but

593
02:07:04.530 –> 02:07:10.569
Allison Snow: don’t know if I’ve ever met someone that wouldn’t benefit from a little thought there, including my own firm. So.

594
02:07:10.570 –> 02:07:32.919
Scott Brinker: I have no investment in any of these companies, but I will give a plug to these Saas management platforms like Bettercloud or Zylo, or there’s a whole bunch of them, because what they do is they plug into your environment. They connect to your finance systems, tech validation systems. And they actually will give you like a full picture of this is all the software you have.

595
02:07:33.080 –> 02:07:54.609
Scott Brinker: And every single time I’ve seen like, because it’s almost like a classic setup. You can ask people what they think they have in their tech stack and how many tools and want that, and they’ll give you a number, and then you’ll get this report on what they actually have in their org. And it’s not unusual for it to be 10 x not 2 x 3 x. I’m talking like 10 x the size, and people are like

596
02:07:54.910 –> 02:08:04.699
Scott Brinker: what? Oh, my God! You know. And then at least, you’ve got a a set of truth where you’re like. Okay, now, let’s sort of go through these one by one and like, what do we need? What are we using? What’s a waste.

597
02:08:05.020 –> 02:08:19.389
Allison Snow: Totally. It reminds me of the commercial, and I don’t know who it is, but it’s a consumer commercial that says we’re going to find how many subscriptions you have, and someone says I have 2, but they don’t. They have 20. They have 10 x absolutely fascinating.

598
02:08:19.840 –> 02:08:25.129
Allison Snow: And I think the plugs are so useful. I know I know I don’t have those tools on my radar. I know that.

599
02:08:25.720 –> 02:08:27.029
Allison Snow: Thank you for sharing that.

600
02:08:27.723 –> 02:08:31.656
Allison Snow: Do you think that the concept of digital ops orchestration

601
02:08:32.430 –> 02:08:38.160
Allison Snow: is a is in itself, if applied well, an alignment tool.

602
02:08:39.600 –> 02:08:51.389
Allison Snow: How how do you think it could become a tool or a concept that aligns the marketing and sales revenue. I know we chat a little bit about Hr. Ops, but I’m not going to hold you to that.

603
02:08:51.850 –> 02:08:59.339
Allison Snow: But a little bit of does this concept like? What can? What can we borrow from this concept, if not the full thing to say that there’s alignment value here.

604
02:08:59.670 –> 02:09:00.260
Allison Snow: Good, good!

605
02:09:00.260 –> 02:09:00.840
Scott Brinker: Yeah.

606
02:09:01.140 –> 02:09:10.029
Scott Brinker: So if we go back to that you know, situation, we’re chatting about with big Ops of just all these different things running agents. Automation apps

607
02:09:10.160 –> 02:09:38.559
Scott Brinker: independent of each other, but having interaction effects with each other, sometimes not even realizing it. It is very clear that is a problem. And what’s happening here is with this explosion of AI agents of all varieties, shapes, and forms that’s only accelerating like it’s now multiplying. And the problems are going to continue now to actually accelerate as part of that, too. So I think we do. It is

608
02:09:38.670 –> 02:09:53.939
Scott Brinker: for this digital AI world for business to not devolve into absolute and total chaos. We need some sort of like governance system around that. And there are different models that people are talking about. You know, the most

609
02:09:54.320 –> 02:10:19.229
Scott Brinker: easy one conceptually is, we already have anchor platforms, you know, in our stack, you know whether it’s like, you know, our Crm or our customer engagement platform or Cdp, and there’s a case to be made that those platforms, particularly in the near term, are actually ideal to like, okay, you really want them to serve as the arbiters. So like, if you’re going to have like multiple agents or automations or workflows, any of that.

610
02:10:19.350 –> 02:10:27.109
Scott Brinker: you want to bring it all into those systems, and that that then provides. Yeah, like a single place to make sure things are staying in sync.

611
02:10:27.750 –> 02:10:46.600
Scott Brinker: Now, where that gets challenging is again like that can actually work in the context of, you know, like marketing or sales. Or you know, some products, right? You know, cross both of those worlds. And so they can do that. But then, as you start to get into other more adjacent spaces like, Oh, well, you know, let’s say, whatever digital product

612
02:10:46.600 –> 02:11:14.790
Scott Brinker: we’re running, whether it’s a web app or a mobile app or something like that. Okay, that tends to now start to enter into a slightly different domain where we might be running other kinds of software that manages the experiences that happen there. And so we have to start to find some way to connect them. And again, you can still try and do that in those like core customer platforms. This is what I do at Hubspot with like integrations to Hubspot is so that Hubspot can do that with these other tools. So that’s 1 model.

613
02:11:15.070 –> 02:11:17.710
Scott Brinker: I think there’s another model that

614
02:11:18.200 –> 02:11:28.439
Scott Brinker: not well, all right. There’s another model. Which is these, I’m going to give you 3 models. That was the 1st one. The second one is the use of these tools that

615
02:11:28.690 –> 02:11:42.050
Scott Brinker: we’ll call them workflow automation platforms. You know. And these are like, you know, on more of the Smb side companies like Zapier on more of the you know, Enterprise side, you know, companies like Workato.

616
02:11:42.050 –> 02:12:00.360
Scott Brinker: These were companies that started out initially as what they call integration platform as a service ipass, you know. But really what they were, you know, building out and they’ve leaned more into is saying like, Oh, well, we can let you like automate processes that span the boundaries of multiple products, and

617
02:12:00.360 –> 02:12:15.649
Scott Brinker: both the zapier and workato. Actually, if you go to their websites now, I think they’re all leaning into saying, Oh, well, you don’t just build automations with our stuff. You can build agents with our stuff. And so you could see those tools have a claim in the game to be the ones orchestrating across this.

618
02:12:15.850 –> 02:12:18.539
Scott Brinker: And then the 3rd model, which is the one that is

619
02:12:18.660 –> 02:12:21.900
Scott Brinker: future, leaning a lot of talk.

620
02:12:22.000 –> 02:12:27.160
Scott Brinker: not a lot of implementation out there today is this idea of actually, you know.

621
02:12:27.400 –> 02:12:35.248
Scott Brinker: AI agents, and almost this idea of Master AI agents that control networks of other AI agents.

622
02:12:35.760 –> 02:13:04.110
Scott Brinker: you know I will give a small plug. Dharmesh Shah, who’s the co-founder of Hubspot, actually has a project he’s running, called Agent AI. Letting people build and list, agents and all do this, and he framed it as like, oh, this is a professional network for AI agents, so that you know AI agents could discover each other and maybe do things together. These models are super interesting, as like, Oh, wow! Is this some future of how things get orchestrated across the business.

623
02:13:04.320 –> 02:13:08.799
Scott Brinker: but we’re not there. We’re not anywhere near there today, and so I don’t know. It’s

624
02:13:09.180 –> 02:13:12.580
Scott Brinker: those 3 models, and there’s probably a sequence in them.

625
02:13:14.190 –> 02:13:17.860
Allison Snow: So helpful. I love that you mentioned governance at the beginning. I think that

626
02:13:18.020 –> 02:13:20.410
Allison Snow: it’s so easy to hear governance and and think

627
02:13:21.120 –> 02:13:25.979
Allison Snow: bureaucratic and process, heavy and and sort of slowing things down without

628
02:13:26.930 –> 02:13:34.709
Allison Snow: reciprocal value for it. But I do think we, you know, we said earlier change management is the hard part. I think sometimes governance can be the tool that

629
02:13:35.010 –> 02:13:36.070
Allison Snow: that helps that.

630
02:13:37.050 –> 02:13:42.979
Scott Brinker: Yeah. And governance is hard, it is, and it’s Rebrand loved, you know.

631
02:13:43.299 –> 02:13:47.459
Allison Snow: It needs a rebrand. Maybe maybe we’ll give that some time to go.

632
02:13:49.114 –> 02:13:57.980
Allison Snow: What about privacy? Any concerns anything folks should think about from your perspective in terms of the rise of digital Ops as we’re discussing it.

633
02:13:58.230 –> 02:14:00.960
Allison Snow: And the idea of privacy. And that has.

634
02:14:01.600 –> 02:14:03.949
Allison Snow: it’s a big topic. And we’ve got.

635
02:14:03.950 –> 02:14:04.909
Scott Brinker: As it should.

636
02:14:04.910 –> 02:14:06.499
Allison Snow: I know you have a lot to say about it.

637
02:14:06.500 –> 02:14:30.160
Scott Brinker: Well, I think you know we were talking earlier about, you know, if I was going to give one piece of advice on where to invest it would be in the data and the data layer. And actually, privacy and compliance is one of those reasons is because, yeah, there is some question about privacy that is very contextual of like, how is it being used in that context? But to be honest, the rock solid foundation of it is, we need to know.

638
02:14:30.420 –> 02:14:32.109
Scott Brinker: Who are we talking to?

639
02:14:32.510 –> 02:14:39.730
Scott Brinker: What permissions do we have to talk to them? You know what sort of that history of you know those engagements are, and

640
02:14:39.870 –> 02:15:03.189
Scott Brinker: that all has to come into some sort of centralized data platform. If it’s siloed in different places. This is where we get ourselves in trouble is like, you know, the you know, if the marketing team thinks it has one set of rights to talk to people. But then the customer success team thinks they’re going to run some, you know, recommended promotion, not even trying to do it commercially. They’re probably even trying to like help folks with it.

641
02:15:03.190 –> 02:15:09.949
Scott Brinker: but it’s what do they call it? It’s not a transactional communication here. It’s like a promotional one.

642
02:15:10.313 –> 02:15:20.850
Scott Brinker: And they’re just desynct. And you know, now we’re violating the expectations. And in some cases actually the law. You know of what people you know, expected. So

643
02:15:21.190 –> 02:15:39.479
Scott Brinker: I think if you can get this down into a common data layer, and so that today every one of these major app platforms can sort of use that to update the preferences of the audience, but then also being able to read that and use that as their decisions.

644
02:15:39.480 –> 02:15:53.630
Scott Brinker: And then, when you start thinking about this proliferation of agents again, all of those agents should be like going to that same source of data to like, okay, what is the authoritative source of truth on what our privacy expectations are with each and every individual

645
02:15:53.680 –> 02:15:55.340
Scott Brinker: that we engage with.

646
02:15:57.400 –> 02:16:02.940
Allison Snow: So you said the words customer data platform in order. So you said it.

647
02:16:02.940 –> 02:16:06.859
Scott Brinker: Should I spin around and like, you know, do a hex or, okay? Yeah.

648
02:16:07.140 –> 02:16:14.601
Allison Snow: And then and then you said, you know, authoritative source of truth, super important concepts. Here you alluded to them earlier in the conversation.

649
02:16:15.050 –> 02:16:21.299
Allison Snow: And and someone asked, How is the siloed data being synthesized to provide meaningful and actionable information?

650
02:16:22.200 –> 02:16:25.919
Allison Snow: And this goes back to you. You talked about anchor parts

651
02:16:26.200 –> 02:16:28.960
Allison Snow: of the Martech stack. I think that’s a big part of the answer. But

652
02:16:29.310 –> 02:16:37.390
Allison Snow: it’s really for you. I’m wondering what you want to tell folks about cdps, and and where they live potentially as a source of truth

653
02:16:37.510 –> 02:16:39.529
Allison Snow: versus some of those more anchor

654
02:16:39.700 –> 02:16:42.819
Allison Snow: pieces of the Martek stack like the Crm and marketing automation.

655
02:16:43.639 –> 02:17:06.429
Scott Brinker: Yeah, it’s interesting. We did a survey of how people were thinking of their Martech stack architecture about a year ago. And one of the questions, was this really hand? Wavy, simple thing! Of what do you consider to be the center of your stack? And it was interesting that for b 2 b companies. It was typically the Crm. And then, to a lesser degree, like the marketing automation platform

656
02:17:06.609 –> 02:17:11.749
Scott Brinker: for the b 2 c companies, the most common answer was actually the Cdp.

657
02:17:11.750 –> 02:17:12.279
Allison Snow: Very interesting.

658
02:17:12.280 –> 02:17:16.419
Scott Brinker: You know. And so it’s, you know, there’s just some variance in how people have thought about that.

659
02:17:16.430 –> 02:17:36.160
Scott Brinker: The Cdp space has been going through a lot of really interesting changes, because, like you’ve had, like in the past couple of years, this movement of composable cdps which essentially means like, Oh, your data exists in that cloud data warehouse. And the Cdp is just sort of putting like a activation organizational layer on top.

660
02:17:36.160 –> 02:17:54.335
Scott Brinker: And then you’ve had a bunch of very recent acquisitions in the Cvp space where these, like major systems of engagement, have gone ahead and actually acquired Cvs, because they’re like, Hey, listen, the way in which we think about these data models. It’s entangled, you know, in how we actually, you know, engage with customers.

661
02:17:54.860 –> 02:17:58.589
Scott Brinker: But to me, I think the the way I look at it is.

662
02:17:58.879 –> 02:18:05.360
Scott Brinker: if we weren’t talking about AI every minute of every day, as the big change in our world.

663
02:18:05.360 –> 02:18:07.039
Allison Snow: The time we would have back in our day.

664
02:18:07.040 –> 02:18:26.800
Scott Brinker: Yes, the time we would have. But what we, I think, would be recognizing as a really transformational shift in marketing tech stacks and tech stacks in general is this ascendancy of the Cloud Data Warehouse, the Cloud Data Lake House, because for so long so much data was always locked up in all these different apps in silos.

665
02:18:26.799 –> 02:18:37.909
Scott Brinker: you know, and we’ve steadily been getting to a world where, as companies implement these warehouses and lake houses, they 1st of all, make sure that all data starts to filter down into that. So it’s available in one layer.

666
02:18:37.910 –> 02:18:49.250
Scott Brinker: but also increasingly, apps are getting better and better at being able to then pull data out from that layer when they want to do something with it. And so to me, this is really exciting.

667
02:18:49.270 –> 02:19:02.480
Scott Brinker: But it’s funny the way I would frame it is like the dog who catches the car, you know, for years marketers could complain legitimately like we don’t have access to the data. There’s all this data out there, and we don’t have access to it.

668
02:19:02.480 –> 02:19:24.280
Scott Brinker: you know. Along comes the cloud data warehouse, all the data forms into it. And they’re like great. We have access to all the data. And, oh, my God! Because it’s a mess. It turns out all the data isn’t actually very well organized. It’s conflicting understanding, like what’s up to date. If you have 2 different records that think 2 different opposite things, how do you decide between them.

669
02:19:24.280 –> 02:19:46.140
Scott Brinker: And so we’ve moved from one problem to now, a new problem. And I think it’s in that new problem where the concept of things like cdps, are still incredibly relevant, which is to say, like, Hey, even if all the data is somehow at a storage level down there in the Universal cloud data warehouse or cloud data Lake House. In the context of marketing.

670
02:19:46.139 –> 02:20:02.580
Scott Brinker: we actually do need the ability to say, like, Okay, we want to know what is actually the records of truth for particular things. In fact, what we’re talking about for privacy, like I really do need to know exactly what customer has said. They want a particular preference of how we engage with them. I don’t want to guess on that

671
02:20:02.930 –> 02:20:32.110
Scott Brinker: real answer, you know. And so you try and get these cdps to help provide a context and some governance. We won’t use that word again. But you know some of this like structure on top of that data. And that’s where I think whether Cdp stays independent. And then it’s a sort of a middle layer that can then push things up into systems of engagement, or what we’ve seen with some of these, you know, like rash of acquisitions, you know, in the Cdp space, where people are just sort of moving that into the engagement system itself.

672
02:20:32.480 –> 02:20:39.719
Scott Brinker: I think either of those can work. But it’s this idea of saying I still actually do need some sort of way to manage the data

673
02:20:40.460 –> 02:20:44.059
Scott Brinker: in a more structured way than what I have at the Cloud Data warehouse layer.

674
02:20:44.460 –> 02:20:52.947
Allison Snow: Yeah, the analogy of the of of the dog saying what you know, asking the dog, what will you do if you catch this is is absolutely perfect.

675
02:20:54.160 –> 02:21:04.939
Allison Snow: really clever. You’ve spoken. I I think you’ve spoken to written a bit about systems of record and systems of engagement. I think that’s worth folks digging into. We can’t ask you to go into all that right now, because I see some folks entering

676
02:21:05.090 –> 02:21:11.079
Allison Snow: the room, and that tells me. Oh, we have. We definitely have time for another question or 2. So I’m going to keep going until Julia gives me a.

677
02:21:11.080 –> 02:21:17.450
Scott Brinker: And thanks for bearing with me, as I ramble endlessly on. Some of the you have very precise questions, and I have very rambling answers.

678
02:21:17.450 –> 02:21:23.078
Allison Snow: The last thing I want to do is is force you into any corners? No, this is this is great.

679
02:21:23.640 –> 02:21:24.960
Allison Snow: thank you so much.

680
02:21:26.500 –> 02:21:32.450
Allison Snow: we talked about who owns digital Ops, and we had a lot of good conversations there. I think that

681
02:21:33.900 –> 02:21:39.419
Allison Snow: what I would close on is asking you if you have predictions.

682
02:21:40.040 –> 02:21:45.459
Allison Snow: So I always hated this question. I’ll be honest with you. So I’m doing you such a disservice.

683
02:21:45.460 –> 02:21:46.419
Scott Brinker: Thank you. Bye.

684
02:21:47.059 –> 02:21:59.510
Allison Snow: And such a disservice. And yet I’m doing it. But in terms of digital ops orchestration, everything people came here to hear about. You talked about what Dharmesh Shah is working on as something futuristic, totally buy into that.

685
02:21:59.670 –> 02:22:22.440
Allison Snow: Obviously the I buy into that in the sense that what was once future is now here. I started my career posting dioramas at the airport, because that’s how you market it. Right? So learn digital marketing from Marketo and Hubspot and and and the vendors in those days. And so what? What is sort of 3 to 5 years ahead? What sort of the problems? Sort of problems that we talk about today that you think might get

686
02:22:22.630 –> 02:22:36.449
Allison Snow: solve. So first, st we didn’t have access to the data and we didn’t. We didn’t know what to do with it. But in 3 to 5 years any any other splendid things that we might solve as as revenue marketers, anything we should be scared of.

687
02:22:37.851 –> 02:22:50.169
Scott Brinker: Alright, so I will offer something but with this very large caveat that the pace at which things are changing, I mean, it’s always hard to predict the future. If I could do that really well, I should

688
02:22:50.600 –> 02:23:04.850
Scott Brinker: start a hedge fund. You know, but it is especially hard to predict the future at this point. There’s just so much changing so rapidly, so all I can offer is would be my guess, and I think the things I would guess that

689
02:23:05.530 –> 02:23:10.818
Scott Brinker: are a lot of reason to be very optimistic about where this may end up with is

690
02:23:11.700 –> 02:23:29.520
Scott Brinker: it’s funny again, we’re talking like so much about the tech stack, you know. And I’ve got these specific tools and how they relate to each other. And what does this do? And it’s hard and it’s complex. And what’s really interesting is there’s this movement happening with AI where the ability to create software

691
02:23:29.520 –> 02:23:45.069
Scott Brinker: is just getting easier and easier. And we see these like Gen. AI interfaces where you don’t even have to know a programming language. You just describe in natural language what you want. And the software goes ahead and writes a little program, you know, and executes it for you. And maybe you never even see the code

692
02:23:45.170 –> 02:23:57.640
Scott Brinker: and a lot of what those things are today are simple versions. This is clay christensen, disruptive innovation. It’s starting with the real low end. Use cases. But you can sort of draw an extrapolation there and say, like.

693
02:23:57.650 –> 02:24:11.490
Scott Brinker: Wait, are we headed to a world where, when I want to do something, I don’t have to go and track down a specific tool and learn its particular menu structures and ux and incantations to get things done.

694
02:24:11.490 –> 02:24:34.549
Scott Brinker: but that I can sort of at a level above that be a mode of just like, hey, here’s what I’m looking to do, or here’s what I want, you know, and have an agent actually, then do the work behind the scenes to like, okay, dynamically, create an experience for me that calls the right services, pulls the right data and actually executes that directly I mean, this sounds like something that is very science fiction like today. But

695
02:24:34.640 –> 02:24:40.520
Scott Brinker: you start to see the hints of what people are doing with small use cases of that today, and it’s not inconceivable.

696
02:24:40.710 –> 02:24:50.809
Scott Brinker: And I think the reason I get so excited about that is, you know, we’ll close on that Gartner thing of like, oh, man, people utilizing 33% of their tech stack. They just feel like

697
02:24:51.250 –> 02:25:10.790
Scott Brinker: there’s more tech here than I will ever figure out how to use is if we actually get to this place where the agents provide a layer that we simply describe what we’re actually looking for in outcomes. And they’re figuring out how to like. Take advantage of this amazing tech infrastructure to execute on that that for the 1st time in now, the

698
02:25:11.100 –> 02:25:17.889
Scott Brinker: 25 year history of Martech. We could have the thing that systems are both getting more sophisticated

699
02:25:18.080 –> 02:25:22.160
Scott Brinker: and actually getting much easier to use. And that would be a pretty wild thing.

700
02:25:22.550 –> 02:25:27.649
Allison Snow: Massive, massive, unlock, massive unlock. That would be.

701
02:25:29.260 –> 02:25:31.629
Allison Snow: I could do this all day, Scott.

702
02:25:31.630 –> 02:25:34.890
Scott Brinker: You’re very kind. This has been great chatting with you, Allison.

703
02:25:34.890 –> 02:25:36.641
Allison Snow: Thank you. It’s been great for me, too.

704
02:25:37.620 –> 02:25:41.979
Allison Snow: Julia, thank you for for giving me the opportunity to to join you guys here.

705
02:25:42.130 –> 02:25:56.159
Julia Nimchinski: It was really insightful. Thank you so much, Allison. Thank you so much, Scott. Before we wrap things up we still have 2 min. So how about you both share your prediction for 2025, when it comes to digital Ops orchestration. And AI.

706
02:25:57.530 –> 02:25:58.530
Allison Snow: I’ll go first, st because.

707
02:25:58.530 –> 02:26:00.619
Scott Brinker: Solved in 2025.

708
02:26:00.620 –> 02:26:01.180
Allison Snow: Awesome.

709
02:26:03.930 –> 02:26:19.370
Allison Snow: I was. Gonna say, I’ll go first, st just because I already said to Scott with an unfair question and gave it to him, anyway, so I appreciate that you turned it back to me. That makes sense. I I don’t think that it will be solved. But, man, I what I will tell you is, I often say to myself, whenever I’m in Chat, gpt as an

710
02:26:19.670 –> 02:26:23.510
Allison Snow: extremely amateur user, this is the best $20 a month I spend.

711
02:26:24.120 –> 02:26:28.030
Allison Snow: I can’t believe I write this huge check to Comcast and get this

712
02:26:28.180 –> 02:26:35.820
Allison Snow: for $20 from Chat Gpt. So I think one of the things that we’ll find is with with people like me

713
02:26:36.210 –> 02:26:43.769
Allison Snow: having access to tools like this at what I call consumer prices or super accessible prices. I’m not expensing this. I’m not

714
02:26:44.020 –> 02:26:49.049
Allison Snow: thinking about, you know, and I know that everyone else, too. And maybe I want to write my own blog post, and I’ll go have

715
02:26:49.240 –> 02:26:52.471
Allison Snow: have a a generative AI make make my image.

716
02:26:53.000 –> 02:27:15.380
Allison Snow: I I think we’ll find that we didn’t pay a ton of attention to the G. Word, Scott. We’ll think of a different word for it. The governance word to kind of say, hey, you can. You know we still have brand standards right? We really still care about that. Maybe we’re a bit rigid about it. We still care that if you are, you know, using Chat Gpt to write an email to a customer that maybe we, we want to have some

717
02:27:15.490 –> 02:27:37.969
Allison Snow: collective organizational thoughts on that right? Just because you’re using a tool. That is, that is sort of unsanctioned. So it sounds a bit rigid, but I do think we’ll find that we get in a mild amount of trouble in each individual organization by not having a little more conversation about the rules of the game, and and how each of us is going to bring our own consumer tools

718
02:27:38.130 –> 02:27:40.639
Allison Snow: to to our workplace, and and.

719
02:27:41.080 –> 02:27:45.589
Allison Snow: you know, even using it for things like speed and things that are generally really really good. But also

720
02:27:45.936 –> 02:28:01.279
Allison Snow: you know, I never met an it department that kind of said, Go, do your own thing. I don’t care. That’s not. That’s not how that works. So I think we’ll we’ll think about about that, and and see what that looks like in 2,025. And Scott, part of me, having a long answer, was giving you some room to breathe, because we just pummeled you for an.

721
02:28:01.280 –> 02:28:05.359
Scott Brinker: That was a brilliant answer, Allison, I’ll just plus one that.

722
02:28:07.530 –> 02:28:16.900
Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much, both such a pleasure. How can our community support you if that Scott Martech journal.

723
02:28:17.200 –> 02:28:37.140
Scott Brinker: Oh, yeah. Well, hey? By the way, one of the things we’re running for Martek right now is every year we run a contest we call the stackies. We invite marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates their martek stack. However, they want. However, they think about it. We actually make donations, so there’s no fee to enter. We make a donation to a nonprofit for every legit entry we get.

724
02:28:37.140 –> 02:28:52.699
Scott Brinker: So if you’re willing and able to share. I mean so many of the changes Alison and I were talking about like stacks are evolving. How people are thinking about them is evolving. So my one ask would be to consider. Yes, sending something into the stackings and sharing with the community like, How is your stack evolving.

725
02:28:54.410 –> 02:28:55.399
Julia Nimchinski: Doesn’t help it herself.

726
02:28:55.400 –> 02:29:02.900
Allison Snow: If you’re waiting for me, it’s a total plus one. Those are fascinating to see. It helps folks like Scott contribute to

727
02:29:04.370 –> 02:29:08.270
Allison Snow: sessions like this, and in a tremendously meaningful and insightful way. So

728
02:29:08.410 –> 02:29:10.520
Allison Snow: please do that, please do that.

729
02:29:11.200 –> 02:29:15.599
Julia Nimchinski: Thank you again, and we are transitioning to our next panel.

730
02:29:15.870 –> 02:29:16.790
Allison Snow: Amazing.