This first of three articles on personalization at scale explores the right place for personalization services in your marketing technology stack

Online personalization as a concept has been with us for more than two decades, but recent developments have elevated its importance for martech leaders:

• Greater attention to test and optimization leading to demands for more “always-on” personalization programs;
• Better access to customer data and segments, opening up possibilities for more targeted experiences in any digital setting;
• Emergence of AI and ML-based approaches for automating personalization logic; and
• Heightened customer expectations for relevancy, leavened by experience with major consumer platforms like Netflix.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) providers saw a growth resurgence of sorts in the past six months. The CDP industry continued to expand in the first half of 2021, adding 20 vendors for a total of 151, more than 1,200 employees and $550 million in funding, according to the released last month by the CDP Institute.

The growth represents a jump-start to an industry that saw a “brief slowdown” at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic more than year ago, according to David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute.  “Everybody kind of froze last year when things first came down,” Raab told CMSWire. “...The world did not end, and it turned out there's a lot of demand for this stuff because everybody's doing digital transformation, and digital transformation requires good customer data.”

Before evaluating a martech solution, be ready with a methodical approach and a set of key questions.

When selecting vendors or services firms, martech buyers ask for references often, but check them rarely. Perhaps you believe you already learned enough from your peers, or perhaps you trust your gut instincts on a platform or vendor. However, when you skip this step, you miss an opportunity to enrich your understanding of a solution and supplier, which can hinder your evaluation, but also potentially slow down the actual implementation.

Based on two decades of helping large enterprises select the right martech platforms, I believe martech customers should overcome any reticence and arm themselves with a methodical approach. A savvy reference checker will employ a variety of different approaches and questions to obtain a richer and more transparent view of potential suppliers. Moreover, reference checking is invaluable when it transcends simple lists of strengths and weaknesses to uncover broader issues of supplier “fit” for you. And it’s all about fit!

So I’m happy to share twenty-five specific questions for which my Real Story Group colleagues and I have experienced good results. But first, like any good campaign, you need to set it up right…

Industry surveys over multiple decades have repeatedly shown that more than half of technology projects fail to meet their objectives — or just fail outright. My discussions with martech customers suggest their success rates are no better.

There are many reasons for this, but in my experience, most technology problems originate in the critical early stages of an initiative. Once the boat gets headed in a particular direction, it can be hard to steer it back on course.

Choosing the right vendor and technology for your marketing initiatives is one of the most critical decisions you can make in those early stages. The wrong choice won’t necessarily doom a project, but it can make success much more difficult to achieve.

In the end, selecting technology better means selecting better-fitting technology. Here’s a look at 10 steps for doing just that. Read More.

In 2019 when IBM suddenly let go of nearly all its martech portfolio, I joked that it reversed an ancient adage: while perhaps “no one ever got fired for recommending Big Blue,” it turns out IBM can fire you. Yet, IBM was not alone. Big martech vendors — even successful ones — routinely jettison or replace longstanding tools.

Yet, when it comes to perceived viability and stability, enterprise customers often fear smaller martech players. Early in my career as an industry analyst, I noticed that some of the best web content and experience management (WCM) solutions came from lesser-known vendors. Upon hearing this, my industry elders would pull me aside and say, “sure, but how much longer will that WCM vendor be around?” It’s a tough question to answer, because of course no one can ever really know, and martech marketplaces are highly fragmented. (“Fragmented” is analyst-speak for, you have a hell of a lot of choices!) Read More.

A couple week’s ago in RSG’s inaugural MarTech column, I made the case for refactoring your MarTech stack to focus on lower level “Foundational Services.” Today let’s dig deeper into what that means for your manifold customer data platform technology choices. Read more.

Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, which helps enterprises make technology decisions said it’s a big win for speed-to-market and adaptiveness, "if IT or some sort of data office has been building and activating segments so far, and the CDP is able to successfully enable marketers to do this themselves." Read More.

By nearly every measure, marketing technology stacks are getting more cluttered. Stack leaders and ops managers need to manage a wider set of tools, across a growing number of channels, while getting bombarded with pitches for new capabilities from vendors and colleagues alike.

Meanwhile, stack leaders face pressure from business executives and sometimes IT leadership to rationalize their environments and justify incremental spend. Read More.

The latest meeting of Real Story Group's private MarTech Leadership Council centered around marketing and creative operations in the wake of the pandemic. The session included a case study from a Fortune 50 consumer goods firm along with some RSG analysis. These meetings are confidential, so I can't share all the juicy details and side conversations, but below I'll offer a general overview of some team findings.

This topic was particularly apropos following a Council meeting earlier this year on "Content Supply and Demand Chains." Looking at full-cycle processes inevitably takes you to considerations around operations. When it comes to MarTech operations, there's a wide range of topics to discuss! Here's a sampling of where enterprise stack leaders generally concurred. Read More.

Tony Byrne, CEO and founder of Real Story Group, which provides WCM technology assessments and strategies for buyers, is skeptical of a successful CMS “combination platter approach.” He told CMSWire there is no “combination play” in this market.

Byrne cited what he deemed as failed examples, some going back decades:

Mediasurface: The original combination platter was, which had three different CMS tools, Byrne noted. That failed, he said, and they all died via Alterian and then SDL.

Divine: Roll-up tech company divine had three different CMS tools, also on purpose. All died except for Content Server, which went to Oracle via FatWire. FatWire killed its own homegrown CMS when they bought Content Server from divine, another failed combination, according to Byrne.

Episerver-Ektron: We did find Ektron still with a heartbeat as recently as last June. But there is no denying Episerver's lobbying efforts to get Ektron users to abandon ship and get on Episerver (which is now Optimizely).

OpenText: OpenText at one time sold and managed five different WCM tools:  Gauss, Obtree, RedDot, Vignette, TeamSite.

"In the examples of killed-by-roll-up systems, I cannot recall a single time where the vendor did not say, ‘We are going to support the new system...things will work out well...synergies…" Byrne said. "They have to say that. And they are always, always lying."

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