What trends do you think are disrupting marketing right now? GDPR? Advertising overload? Privacy concerns with Facebook? While those are certainly disrupting, at the MarTech West conference Scott Brinker spoke about the five disruptions he sees. He started by talking about all the hype going on with marketing technology. AI, AR, ChatBots, Bots, and many more technologies are going through inflated expectations right now. See Gartner’s Hype Cycle research for an explanation of the Hype Cycle. But overall, Scott thinks that marketing technology is achieving a lot and many good technologies have emerged that haven proven valuable.
Scott’s 5 Disruptions:
1. Digital Transformation has been driving a lot of change as companies try to become more customer focused. He sites this statistic as a key piece of evidence in this disruption: 60% of marketing leaders have restructured to better leverage marketing tech. Marketing has a mandate (67% of companies surveyed) for cross-organization growth, customer experience, and champion a customer centric corporate culture and mindset. For marketing, transformation is about thinking like a CEO, not a CMO. 
2. Microservices & API – The explosion of cloud has been very disrupting in a good way for most. Scott cited that the average number of cloud apps is 1,000 per company. Marketing services accounts for 91 of the 1,000. HR has 90. IT has 25. So non-IT departments are driving the cloud disruption and hence microservices & APIs. iPaaS systems have been growing tremendously. iPaaS systems provide orchestration of services as well as actual services and APIs. Salesforce just purchased MuleSoft for 6.5B which shows the importance of services to their business. Microservices is enabling quicker deployment of new business capabilities. They can also enable ‘citizen developers’ to create applications.
3. Vertical Competition – battles for exclusive touch points with customers. There is not a one-to-one touchpoint from marketer to customer. There are many intermediaries, like agencies, consultants, internet services, client interfaces, devices. 
These different channels/providers/etc. try to interject into the customer experience. They also set the rules in some cases. For example, Amazon Echo / Alexa is a tightly controlled touchpoint between a marketer and consumer. The marketer may want to get a particular message out, but Alexa may have different ideas.
4. Digital Everything – Digital is no longer just one or two channels. We have an explosion of channels – Wearables, Chat, POS, IoT, Voice, Social, Mobile, Email, Web, etc. Standards are essential because they enable the orchestration of complexity at scale. Think of a ballet – the movements come down to 5 foot positions, 5 arm positions, etc. They are very simple standards that can be combined in an almost unlimited way to produce an experience.
5. Artificial Intelligence – automation / complexity explosion. Scott ran out of time to discuss this disruption. However, we are seeing many major vendors trying to incorporate AI into their products. Adobe Sensei, IBM Watson, Salesforce Einstein are all branded versions of AI embedded into marketing platforms.
What do you think of these disruptive forces? Do you see any disruptions that Scott missed?
Scott ran out of time before talking about the most important, and far-reaching change in MarTech…AI, and more specifically predictive analytics IS the future of marketing.