Winners and losers in the coming shake-out

Complicated market? An attempt to visualise the marketing technology industry (by chiefmartec.com)

The media industry will one day be forced to grow up and consolidate as the leading players and true business drivers start to emerge, writes Ghostery’s Scott Meyer.

The level of technology available to today’s marketers is staggering.

As chiefmartec.com’s Scott Brinker famously pointed out, there are now over 2,000 companies offering some flavour of marketing optimisation – a number that grows every day.

This growth is driven by many factors including an infusion of funding to marketing tech companies and the continuing emergence of new categories, as well as the need to map all elements of a buyer’s journey – from browsing, consideration and purchase, through to usage and repeat purchase.

While the industry is still relatively turbulent, at some point in the very near future it will be forced to grow up and consolidate as the leading players and true business drivers start to emerge. Now is the time to ask: who will be the winners and who will be the losers in the coming industry shake-out?

Here are some questions marketers, as well as providers of marketing technology, should be asking themselves:

Is this marketing tech really driving business value?

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The first question to ask when identifying which marketing technology will be leading the future charge is how much business value the solution drives relative to web performance.

An A/B testing tool might collect valuable data that tells you if a blue button is going to convert better than a red button, but if it slows down your site and causes users to abandon then it’s not driving any business value at all.

It’s important to measure the performance of tools, not only in the way they drive conversion but also in their impact on the website itself. Does it cause latency? How much?

Marketing will be best served when it partners with IT and web operations to set agreed parameters for vendor technology performance. Vendor technologies that perform the best will then naturally rise to the top of the heap.

Does this vendor technology offer a unique functionality?

In a new and emerging space, vendors rush in to fill a gap resulting in a plethora of “me too” tech. Referring again to The Marketing Technology Landscape, multiple vendors compete in the same category, often with very little nuance.

Vendors must offer something truly unique to marketers – whether they are DMPs, testing and optimisation providers, or social media tools – to demonstrate measurable value. Only then will they differentiate themselves from similar players in the market.

Does the technology serve the Marketing and IT sides of the house?

This flood of new technologies is designed to make life better for marketers but what about the IT side of the house? Does this just give them a headache?

The IT department might recognise that a particular technology is wreaking havoc on website performance, or that a certain tag has broken and is impacting load time, but rather than simply deleting it they need to track down the owner of the tag and conduct a full-scale investigation into how useful the technology really is.

When deciding which vendors make the grade, marketers should seek robust technology that doesn’t break the page, and allows marketing and IT to pursue their common goals.

The natural selection process in the marketing tech ecosystem has begun and only the fittest will survive. Marketers and providers of marketing tech need to rigorously assess their technologies to ensure the one they have chosen will be the winners rather than the losers in the coming shakeout.

Scott Meyer is CEO of Ghostery