Marketing technology has come a long way since the fictional Harry Crane got a mainframe installed at Sterling Cooper. In light the continued expansion of Scott Brinker’s marketing tools landscape and the role of marketers in managing the end-to-end customer experience, there’s no doubt technology will play an increasingly important role in the marketing function.
The question is: how technical should marketers become?
Image credit: A Big Picture Window
The recent Big Data Tech 2017 event in Minneapolis drew more than 1,000 attendees from across the business spectrum—IT, marketing, finance, operations—to learn about trends in data management and analytics. The event organizer, MinneAnalytics, is a fantastic group and did an excellent job with the conference, which had several standing-room-only sessions.
What was striking though was how technical even the “non-technical” sessions were. In presentations ostensibly targeted at business users, the content often seemed more focused on the underlying functions of data management than on actual applications of analyzing information.