Technology/Technology Decisions

T1. Track Keynote Panel: Marketing Technologists Discuss Multichannel and Enterprise Integration Challenges

Marketing technologists are no longer rare birds, though they are often found in unfamiliar environments with less than obvious plumage. There are marketing technologists in many of our sessions this year, but we have selected a few to look at the two toughest challenges they, and their organizations, face in building modern digital strategies: support for consistent current and future multichannel experiences, and the necessary integration of data from multiple enterprise systems.

E2. Enterprise Social - Is it Living up to its Promise?

Hmm… lots riding on how you define “it” and “its Promise”, but it is an interesting question to the uninitiated because of the wide range of opinion. There are plenty of examples of organizations that are convinced they have reaped huge benefits from incorporating an enterprise social platform, bought or built. But there are also many who are not so sure. There is also a split decision among investors. In this session two analysts will attempt to clarify what is going on.

P2. eBook Platforms, Standards, and Uses - Expert Panel Discussion

As eBooks have moved from the consumer marketplace into education, business and even demanding applications like STM publishing, the bar for quality, accuracy and rich, interactive experiences has been raised significantly. Yet, at the same time, eBooks continue to evolve along several dimensions with the proliferation of platforms and devices, publishing standards, technologies, and delivery channels. This session brings together three experts who will help you navigate the myriad decisions needed to produce engaging and effective eBooks.

T3. Marketing Automation, Data, and Multichannel Marketing

The term “marketing automation” has grown from referring to simple workflow tools to help companies and their partners manage campaigns to being used to cover a much broader and more amorphous set of capabilities. Both of the presentations in this session cover the use of data in marketing automation, one from an analytical perspective, and one from a case study.

C4. How to Manage Multichannel Content Marketing

Content is certainly the unifying element of a brands’ marketing across physical as well as digital channels. Once you have created your killer content how do you maximize its reach? How do you push out your content beyond your own channels in ways that are manageable? This session includes presentations by two organizations that have built marketing strategies based on the centrality of content and the power of effective distribution.

C5. Optimizing the Customer Experience with Analytics

Optimization has been on many a marketer’s radar for some time though far too many still underutilize much of the data they have collected. Those who are already looking beyond the usual web analytics for optimization ideas will benefit from the two additional suggestions presented in this session.

P5. The Future of Advertising Panel

Advertising used to be simple - well you could always make bad choices - but keeping up with all the ways advertising technology and channels are changing is enough to make some marketers yearn for early retirement options. Last year we looked at Ad Exchanges, Data Exchanges, Real Time Bidding (RTB), Demand Side Platforms, and Supply Side Platforms. Our panel this year will look at a number of topics including the use of ethnography and digital anthropology to craft relationship-building ads, multiple ways to manage cross-platform advertising, and how content strategists can help create user-centric, not marketer-centric experiences.

T8. How to Improve Findability

Efficiency (speed), accuracy and comprehensive results have long been measuring units by which search engines and search within applications have been judged for findability. Human factors and design play into the efficiency of any search experience. Algorithms determine the validity (relevance) of items retrieved for a given query, and they also determine how complete results (recall) are against a given corpus of content. Search experts who seek to implement search engines for relevance or recall also need quality data to make tuning decisions.

Our speakers in this session will give us three views of what it takes to improve design and content for findability. They will speak to points of usability, as well as how high quality metadata supported by specialized taxonomies, contribute to those improvements.

T9. Cognitive Computing, Machine Learning, and Big Data

Cognition is recognized as a human brain function, combining individual knowledge with contextual understanding. Keeping this in mind, we will be interested to learn more about the emerging field of cognitive computing from industry insiders. We will hear from industry analysts about the work of the recently formed Cognitive Computing Consortium, which has gathered a cross-disciplinary roster of expert members who are evaluating the impact this new style of computing may have on innovation and business performance. We will also hear an industry perspective from pioneers in the application of cognitive software to business problem solving.

With the volume of data in most enterprises far surpassing the amount of quality curated content by orders-of-magnitude, we look to technology to make raw data more meaningful. Over several generations of machine learning and artificial intelligence software, the technology has now brought advanced decision support out of the lab and into the business mainstream. Our speakers will give us the context, state-of-the-art, and future directions for this newly launched area of computing.