Research firm Gartner is out today with its latest Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising 2019 report [for a fee, or for Gartner clients], pointing to four emerging trends that it says will transform the martech ecosystem.
They are:
- Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
- AI for Marketing
- Blockchain for Advertising
- Real-Time Marketing
The Hype Cycle reports track innovative technologies over a lifecycle that includes an initial Peak of Inflated Expectations that is sometimes followed by a more settled era of productive uses.
Confusion of CDP and CRM
The basic idea of this report, which looks at 28 technologies, is to provide some guidance to their adoption curves and actual potentials, and outline what is still needed before the technology can become part of mainstream marketing tech.
CDP’s expectations, the report says, remain at an all-time high — but half the surveyed marketers say their “CDP” is actually their customer relationship management (CRM) system.
The movement of CDP technology from Inflated Expectations to actual usefulness, the research firm said, has been slowed by this kind of confusion about CDPs, and its overlapping functions with other tech.
AI for marketing will eventually transform marketing, Gartner says, but it is slowed by the fact that the term is used to describe so many functions.
Blockchain, perhaps the poster boy for hyped marketing tech, offers promise in many areas and is gaining support with leading organizations and vendors, but the report notes that there are still serious issues with scalability, performance and adoption.
Real-Time Marketing
And Real-Time Marketing, driven by the real-time nature of search technologies and social media, essentially describes the central use case of digital marketing: right offer or message at the right time, based on behaviors. But there is still work to do on when a real-time response is warranted and what it might contain, work that Gartner indicated needs more analysis of more customer data.
Among the remainder of the 28 surveyed technologies, Gartner also looked at conversational marketing, Over-the-Top (OTT) TV advertising, consent and preference management, and visual search for marketing.
In the past, the research firm said, other innovative technologies have moved off the Hype Cycle because they’ve been widely adopted after their initial period of Inflated Expectations. These have included data management platforms, data-driven marketing, multidimensional campaign segmentation, content marketing and social media management.