Event Summary February 9, 2016

2016 MAMA2

The 2016 MAMA2 (MinneAnalytics does Marketing Analytics) took place January 22, 2016 at Medtronic’s Mounds View campus and attracted over 400 attendees from the Twin Cities Analytics community. MAMA is Minnesota’s premier event for Data Science in Marketing Analytics and is run by MinneAnalytics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving Minnesota’s data science and analytics community.

Trexin was a Silver sponsor of the event where over twenty speakers delivered presentations on a wide variety of topics related to Marketing Analytics. The highlight of the one-day conference a keynote talk by Scott Brinker, CTO of Ion Interactive, a Boston digital marketing platform vendor, and editor of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog. He spoke on the topic of his upcoming book, “Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative.”

Trexin principal consultant, Isaac Cheifetz, spoke on the topic of “How to Hire (or get hired as) a Chief Marketing Technologist,” as per the following synopsis:

Chief Marketing Technologists are IT architects who are immersed in marketing to the point where they have expertise in both tool kits. Their role, as defined by Scott Brinker, is to be the Chief Marketing Officer’s architect and “general contractor” for constructing and continuously enhancing the firm’s digital marketing platform, choosing from among the hundreds of niche technology, data, and service vendors available in today’s marketing technology ecosystem.

Brinker explains the rise of the CMT by stating, “Marketing is taking over the business. In a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire customer experience that it delivers, from the very first touch point onward — is now the scope of marketing.” In other words, marketing is no longer about creating communications to project at a customer but creating a digital experience for them to immerse themselves in.

What is the career path for a Chief Marketing Technologist? The best CMTs are curious, lifelong learners who have gone back and forth between enterprise architect roles and field marketing roles for marketing service providers like Acxiom or Harte Hanks. Until recently their hybrid skill set was an impressive accomplishment but not a critical need for a marketing department. Progressive companies are not relying on serendipity to find these rare individuals but are creating structured career paths for moving promising IT architects into marketing roles. Professionals seeking these roles should find roles (full-time, project, or consulting) that give them depth in the several key competencies of the CMT – marketing, the marketing technology “stack,” and Agile marketing/DevOps.

Six Trexin consultants attended the event or the VIP reception the previous evening. The consensus was that conference was striking in its caliber and size, feeling more like a national conference than a local one.