Interview with MarTech

Marketing has become a technology-powered discipline. While it’s still ultimately about the customer and the story, the way we tell those stories to our audience in a digital world is now thoroughly entangled in a whole field of technologies — search, social, mobile, IoT, etc. The software that marketers acquire, how they connect it together, and most importantly, how they apply it to produce and distribute brilliant marketing has a tremendous impact on their success.

While there are many great digital marketing conferences out there, MarTech focuses on the the technology — helping marketers understanding how to manage it, strategize around it, and evolve their organizations to take full advantage of these new capabilities. If you want to attend a conference that tackles those topics at a “graduate level” and meet your peers who are doing this same, MarTech was designed for you.

Mid-to-senior level marketing executives, digital leaders, marketing technologists, and IT executives who are collaborating closely with marketing.

Most speakers at MarTech are either executives in brands, both B2B and B2C, who have personally tackled challenges and opportunities with marketing technology strategy and management, or independent thought leaders who can share a deep level of expertise on a specific topic.

We try to cross-pollinate ideas from a variety of difference sources and real-world experiences, so that the audience takes away as many new ideas and fresh perspectives on their work as possible.

For every event, we provide an open call-for-speakers to solicit suggestions from across the industry. We’re currently now accepting proposals for our next conference in San Francisco in the spring:

There are many great conferences out there today. We focus exclusively on marketing technology management though.

Program-wise, we lean towards individual speakers, who give focused, 20-minute talks — rather than a lot of panels that can sometimes wander.

We also run the editorial portion of the conference independent of sponsorships — so there’s no pay-to-play speakers with hidden agendas. All of our speakers are selected solely because we feel they have the best stories to tell and that the audience will learn the most from them.

MarTech is produced by Third Door Media, the company behind the leading search marketing conference, SMX, and the popular websites Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. They do all the hard work to make sure that every facet of the conference experience is the best it can be.

I’m the program chair, so I organize the topics and the speakers and serve as the emcee during the event, with tremendous support from our fantastic advisory board that includes industry pioneers and luminaries such as Mayur Gupta, Terence Kawaja, and David Raab.

I actually see more similarities than differences. The leaders on both sides of the pond are pushing the envelope in similar ways, and I think can learn a lot from each other.

Similarly, the companies that are struggling are usually wrestling with many of the same issues — most of them around organizational capital more than the underlying technology.

However, given all the amazing digital marketing thought leaders whom I follow that are based in London, my impression is that London is a particularly conducive environment for marketing innovation.

We launched our first event in Boston in August 2014. But I’ve been writing and engaging with the marketing tech community since 2008 through my blog, chiefmartec.com.