That’s great, it starts with a deep fakeData lakes, and bot campaignsAnd Elon Musk is not afraid…
The rules of marketing are changing, again
First, consider the pillars of digital marketing for the past 20 years.
There’s email. In 2023, an estimated 347 billion emails were sent every day. However, depending on whose estimate you believe — and how broad your definition of “spam” is — somewhere between 48% to 85% of those messages were considered spam. Now, Google and Yahoo are clamping down with new, stringent bulk email policies. It’s estimated that only 40% of enterprises currently meet these requirements. Bulk senders with spam rates greater than 0.3% may have all their emails summarily rejected from that point forward.
There’s calls and texts. Anti-spam defenses are on the rise in these channels too. Cold calls are increasingly blocked, silenced automatically. Uninvited SMS messages are easily reported as junk to the carriers who can filter them at the network level.
I know, I know. The messages you send aren’t spam. But if enough of your recipients think they’re spam — and let’s be honest, there have been a lot of messages sent by mostly good marketers that might be viewed that way on the other end of the pipe — then ipso facto, they’re spam. Your domain names and phone numbers can be banished in a snap.
There’s search engines. 36% of website traffic came from organic search last year. The discipline of SEO — core to content marketing and inbound marketing strategies — was built around winning a spot in the first page of “10 blue links” on Google. Now, AI has made it near effortless for competitors to hijack search with automatically generated content at scale. While the longer term disruption is classic SERPs being displaced by direct answers and actions from AI agents. Gartner predicts this will result in a 50% drop in organic search traffic to brands by 2028.
There’s advertising. Last year, Adobe estimated that 75% of marketing and CX leaders still relied on third-party cookies for their advertising strategy. 76% of those brands said the end of third-party cookies will hurt their business. 39% said it would devastate or significantly harm their business. Already this month, Chrome phased out third-party cookies for 1% of their users — with 100% shut down before the end of the year (assuming the UK doesn’t stop it as anti-competitive). Safari and Firefox already blocked third-party cookies years ago.
There’s mobile. Apple killed IDFA on the iPhone and Google killed AAID on Android, which nixed the equivalent of third-party cookies in mobile apps. But the bigger disruption may be the arrival of a flood of new AI devices, such as the Humane Pin, the Rabbit R1, and Jony Ive’s mysterious new device being built in collaboration with OpenAI, aiming to pull people away from the mobile touchpoints marketers have currently built everything for.
Email, search, advertising, mobile. Kinda of a big deal that all of these are being disrupted. All at the same time.
The rules are changing for martech too
Martech has been the engine powering all of these pillars of digital marketing. Marketing automation was born on the back of email (and then SMS too). Adtech thrived with third-party cookie and device identifier targeting. A phalanx of SEO and content marketing tools mastered the art and science of the Google dance.
As these pillars change, obviously, martech must adapt.
But there are other changes roiling the martech industry itself. The martech landscape has continued to grow more crowded (in December, we noted its now up to 13,080 solutions). Complexity in martech stacks has grown, contributing to record-low martech utilization rates reported by Gartner last year. Perhaps not surprisingly, more of the martech stack is now moving from marketing to IT.
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