Insider's View: Ad Tech & MarTech Q&A with a Director of Growth at an E-Commerce Marketing Platform

This instalment of the Insider's View series features a conversation with the Director of Growth at a SaaS e-commerce marketing platform — a role he grew into after starting as an intern. The platform helps online retailers increase average revenue per visitor by combining on-site marketing automation with personalization and data management, giving brands a unified view of their influencers and the tools to act on that data in real time.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background in the Ad Tech/MarTech industry?

I've spent the last four years at this company, currently as Director of Growth, though I've touched just about every corner of the business. Time on both the sales and client success sides has given me a pretty direct window into the challenges brands are actually dealing with day to day.

2. What does your platform do, and how does it fit into the broader digital marketing picture?

We're an on-site marketing platform working with any brand that sells online to help them sell more. More specifically, we help brands identify their top-performing influencers, generate more sharing, referrals, and traffic, and then convert that traffic into revenue.

To put it in context, consider your typical large-scale e-commerce retailer. The digital marketing technology stack on their website generally covers areas like:

• Conversion Optimization Tools
• Referrals & Sharing
• Retargeting
• On-Site Search
• Tag Management
• Email Marketing
• Reviews and Ratings
• Loyalty Points
• Hosting / Content Delivery Networks
• Analytics
• Social Media Management

The platform addresses four of those categories specifically — Conversion Optimization Tools, Referrals & Sharing, Retargeting, and Analytics — while also integrating with or enhancing some of the others, such as Email Marketing and Tag Management. A lot of brands find that appealing: one vendor relationship instead of four.

3. What technology platforms do you rely on day to day?

Tools like Marketo and Google Analytics handle the email marketing management and analytics side of things — plus a bit of proprietary logic layered on top.

4. What's the single most disruptive force heading toward Ad Tech and MarTech?

Long term, I'd point to artificial intelligence and machine learning. That's where the real upheaval is going to come from.

A fairly straightforward example: imagine building a model of your email database that simulates how each real subscriber actually behaves, then running hundreds or more test email variations through that model to identify the highest-converting version. Or taking it a step further — generating a genuinely personalized email for every individual subscriber. And that's not even looking very far ahead. It's an open question how much human involvement will even be required at that point.

5. What are the biggest challenges facing the Ad Tech/MarTech industry right now?

The pace at which new platforms emerge and reach scale is something the industry hasn't had to deal with before, and it presents a real challenge for marketers trying to keep up.

Fifty years ago, the main channels available to marketers were TV, radio, print ads, and direct mail. New mediums took considerable time to develop reach. Today, a platform like Snapchat can go from zero to 100 million daily active users in under four years. And on top of that, tracking the effectiveness of marketing or advertising messages distributed through platforms like Snapchat is notoriously difficult. Instagram has better ad tracking capability, but even there the measurement picture is still evolving.

Both individual marketers and the broader industry are now expected to keep pace with platforms that accumulate massive audiences in record time. That's genuinely hard.

6. The MarTech landscape gets more complex every year. What advice do you have for marketers trying to choose the right vendors?

The complexity isn't going away. Mature segments of the MarTech ecosystem will see more consolidation, but every genuinely new technology creates an opening for new companies to enter the space — so by nature, the map keeps expanding. Marketers have to stay current; that's the job.

A few practical things to keep in mind when evaluating advertising or marketing software:

A. Case studies are consistently undervalued. They show how a technology actually gets used and what results look like in practice, but they also give you a feel for what working with that company will be like over time.

B. Speaking of which — don't forget to assess the working relationship itself. The MarTech landscape is wide enough that there are usually several vendors offering comparable capabilities. The quality of the day-to-day relationship, from your primary contact through to anyone else you'll interact with, matters more than it tends to get credit for during the evaluation process.

C. "Should we just build this in-house?" is a question that comes up constantly. There are real advantages to building internally, but in today's environment buying is usually the better call. Software is expensive to maintain and upgrade after it's built, and it becomes outdated within months of being shipped. What looks like savings often ends up costing more — both financially and in opportunity cost.

The core takeaway: Success comes from focusing on a few things and doing them well. Concentrate on your core business, and let the marketing SaaS vendors concentrate on theirs.

Insider's View is a Q&A series in which leaders at brands, agencies, and technology companies share their perspectives on how Ad Tech and MarTech are being used today — and where things are heading.