Mark Polly

Today at the MarTech West conference in San Jose, Scott Brinker and team unveiled the 2018 MarTech Landscape chart.  Scott has produced The Marketing Technology Landscape chart since 2011.  The chart shows all the companies in the MarTech landscape grouped over many categories, such as Advertising & Promotion, Content & Experience, etc.   While the chart […]

In my previous article (see Executive Introduction to Machine Learning), I provided a concise, jargon-free introduction to what is machine learning.   I basically described it as four steps: 1) Take data in; 2) Run it through an algorithm to make a prediction; 3)  help the machine learn to make better predictions; 4) predict something based […]

In a recent post, Michael Porter asked “What Does AI Have To Do With Strategy?” In discussing the transformational nature of AI, he suggested the very first question you should ask is, “What is AI and Machine Learning?”   Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of research into machine learning to understand the concepts and deep […]

I’ve been noticing a little trend about chatbots lately, so I wondered what’s going on with them?  Just a few years ago, chatbots were a bit of a rage.  With the hype around IBM Watson winning on Jeopardy, the potential seen in Siri and the introduction of Amazon’s Alexa, it seemed that chatbots were primed […]

We commonly think that B2B customers don’t really need mobile.  After all, most B2B sales are highly driven by actual sales people, with web sites supporting them through content like white papers, product information, etc.  B2B customers are also thought to be desk-bound, mainly accessing your B2B content through traditional desktop browsers. Recently, however, we […]

One big focus of Digital Transformation is getting the customer experience right. As we’ve talked about, the customer experience is not just about visits to your website, but also includes interactions with your marketing emails, the in-store experience, how your customer service representatives interact and so on.  We talk about understanding the customer journey across all […]

At Adobe Summit 2017, personalized customer experience was on display in the general sessions, sneaks and many other areas. However, in talking with individuals, I kept hearing that personalization is what they want to do, but they are finding it difficult to replicate what they see at conferences. Some stats to support why personalization is […]

For the past six years at Adobe Summit one of the highlight sessions is called Adobe Sneaks. In this session, Adobe employees display their ideas on future projects and innovations for Adobe customers, potential customers and partners. Not all of the innovations displayed at Sneaks make it into actual products, but in the past, most sneaks have […]

At Adobe Summit 2017, Travis Sabin, Mobile App Product Manager at Adobe, and Benjamin Weiss, Mobile Product Manager at Walgreen Co., presented “The Scuffle on the Strip – Mobile App vs Mobile Web.” Both Mobile App and Mobile Web represent different views of how to supply the best experience for your customers and each have […]

Adobe’s Irina Guseva and Cedric Huesler presented this session at Adobe Summit 2017.  These innovations are coming out in version 6.3, which is due sometime in April 2017. Without further ado, here are the top 10: All you need is a plan – there are so many parts to AEM and the number of people […]

Ray Wang of Constellation Research and Tamara Gaffney with Adobe Digital Insights made predictions about digital video, social media, advertising, mobile and commerce today. Tamara has access to lots of anonymous data in the Adobe cloud. Tamara started by reviewing last year predictions. They were right about flexible screens, voice, connected TVs and VR impact […]

Adobe and Microsoft have started to roll out the solutions they announced in September 2016 that help both companies fill out key gaps in their portfolios. Here are three of the key new offerings from Adobe and Microsoft: Integration of Microsoft Dynamics with Adobe Campaign.  One missing piece of Adobe’s marketing portfolio is CRM and Dynamics […]