In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, Hannah and Mike dive into the latest trends in MarTech. They kick off with Act-On’s new Marketing Technology Insights report, unpacking why small teams are struggling with complex tech stacks and why ease of use now tops the priority list.
The conversation moves to AI, with a debate on whether the hype has peaked, discuss the realities of implementing AI effectively, and explore Adobe’s announcement of specialized AI agents designed to enhance customer experiences.
Finally, they touch on the upcoming Dreamforce event and wrap up with Mike’s tip of the week on GDPR compliance, reminding marketers of the risks of outdated data and the importance of clean databases.
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About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Kelly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 – Introduction to Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:53 – Act-On’s Marketing Technology Insights Report
00:01:15 – Insights on Small Marketing Teams and Tool Stacks
00:03:15 – The Importance of Ease of Use in Marketing Tools
00:04:34 – AI Capabilities and Marketer Priorities
00:06:13 – The Reality of AI in Marketing
00:08:40 – Adobe’s New AI Agents Announcement
00:10:02 – Specific AI Functions vs. General AI Solutions
00:12:11 – The Future of AI in Marketing Platforms
00:13:35 – Discussion on Dreamforce Event
00:15:52 – GDPR Compliance and Data Management Tips
00:17:27 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAABriH7cBjOKakLTry2oZpPzoqKYXgLp0ttY
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Why AI Won’t Do It All, Adobe’s AI Agents & Dreamforce
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we talk about Act-On’s new Marketing Technology Insights report.
Mike: We cover an analyst who thinks AI will do everything for marketers.
Hannah: Adobe’s AI agents.
Mike: Hannah asked me for a ticket to Dreamforce.
Hannah: And Mike talks about the legal implications of poor quality data. Hi Mike, welcome back. We’ve taken a little break for the summer but we’re back now. How are you feeling?
Mike: Well, I’m feeling pretty good and as you know I’ve actually got a conference in Spain next week and I’ve just come back from a conference, so it seems to still be a bit of a holiday for me.
Hannah: Well, let’s kick off because we’ve got loads to cover. Now, Act-On’s has released a really interesting report. It’s focusing on marketing technology insights, and they interviewed around 100 marketers just to see what the state of the landscape was, how marketers are finding their kind of world, market automation platforms, their technology stacks. And it’s released interesting insights. Now, I think the real caveat to say here is that it seems to be focused on small teams. I think about 84% of respondents were from small marketing teams, so bear that in mind. But I think it released some really interesting data, and I know you have some thoughts. So what are you thinking?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I quite enjoyed it, and you’re right, it’s focused on small teams, but I actually think it’s really applicable to everybody. You know, how many clients do we have moaning at us that they’ve got too many people and too much resource? It never happens. So, I think what Act-On, you know, really was saying was that there’s a lot of small marketing teams, a lot of teams pushed for time, and actually the tool stack needs to reflect that. You know, what they’re saying is it’s not really about capability of tools and getting the best, most powerful, most complex tools you can. But ease of use is really important. And also keeping the number of tools to a reasonable level is important. I mean, we just ran a project internally, didn’t we, looking at the tools we used. And I was putting together the slides, and I added a column and shrunk the text. And I had this incredible list of tools. So, I think we all have more tools than we recognize. And that actually can be quite time consuming.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, when you showed it to us, we were like, wow, what does this platform do? What does this platform do? And it’s really interesting because I think the report said it was 92% of teams have 20 or fewer tools in their tech stacks. And I think to me, that screams that one, maybe they don’t have a lot of budget, so they are trying to condense, consolidate. But two, are these marketers just more efficient than us?
Mike: Well, or maybe they just haven’t counted the tools and made a guess. I mean, I think there’s a possibility. You know, I do think that rationalizing of tool stacks is important. I mean, it’s one of the things we’re doing is we’re looking at a quite a big integration and rationalization program to get, you know, things more automated and more efficient. But I think if you look at what people need to do, they need things that really deliver ease of use. And maybe that’s going to be the next best thing in marketing automation. I mean, what do you think?
Hannah: I think that’s a great question about ease of use, Mike, because to me, I would say that’s really important. And I actually think it’s more important than other marketers realise. I mean, one thing in the report that really shocked me is that marketers were asked the question, how do you prioritise AI capabilities? Now, I would have expected, you know, 80% to be like, it’s really important, this is our focus. The largest group, 33%, rated it as really important. So, to me, I’m like, oh, okay, AI actually isn’t their focus. And they are looking at these other functionalities of a marketing automation platform. So, I think sometimes we get lost in the, oh well, you know, AI’s important, this is it, this is what we need to focus on. But ease of use, something really simple, seems to be really important.
Mike: Yeah, and we’ve talked a lot in these podcasts about people who’ve got incredibly powerful marketing automation platforms and use only a tiny fraction of their capabilities. So, I do think there’ll be a bit of a rationalization. It’s easy to add features. It’s not necessarily easy to add ease of use. And clearly, some of the platforms are well ahead of this. And I mean, I guess we’ve got to mention HubSpot at this point, haven’t we? We’ve both used HubSpot a lot and it’s certainly in terms of ease of use; I’d say one of the leading platforms. What do you think?
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we moved away from HubSpot a little while ago. That was a decision we made internally, but I love it as a platform. And I think the functions of how it divides what you focus on. So, I mean, the SEO function of HubSpot is one of the best that I’ve ever seen. You know, I learned everything around content clusters, how to look at our content, content recommendations from HubSpot. So, I think it’s not a tool to be underestimated for sure. But then I also think, you know, there are the bigger platforms like Salesforce, like Marketo, and they also do have some real good benefits. They aren’t as clear and ease of use, I would say. I know several of our clients can sometimes be like, look at the platform and go, I have no idea what I’m doing. So, I think it does vary. Again, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot in the past of what you’re looking to do. But HubSpot has been a key favorite of mine in the past.
Mike: Yeah, and they certainly get a premium for their ease of use, I think. I just want to go back to what you talked about on the AI there, because I found that interesting as well. I thought we’d see most people caring about AI features, and they don’t. I mean, do you think maybe the AI bubbles burst? I mean, we did see also a report by an analyst called Tony Hayes, where he was talking about how AI-driven market automation strategies had improved campaigns. And it’s a little bit difficult because some of the headlines he generated actually don’t reflect what he said. But it’s quite clear that there are companies using AI and are companies getting real benefits out of this, and we’ve certainly seen that to ourselves. But then there’s other projects that are just a disaster. Do you think it’s AI works sometimes and not other times, or do you think it’s just people are not setting AI up correctly?
Hannah: I think it’s a really good question and I’m going to be a bit mean, and I don’t mean this against anything of the marketers out there in the world, but I think sometimes marketers just don’t know how to use it properly. I also think that they believe AI can do everything and it can’t. There are limitations to AI and what it can do and how successful it can be to help with your marketing capabilities. And I think marketers have to go in with an understanding of that first, before that they can then accept it’s helpful or it’s not helpful. I also really like what you said about, have we burst the AI bubble? And I think a little bit, yes. You know, there’s been such a push this year, you know, the first six, seven months of the year where it was. We’ve launched this, Salesforce have launched Einstein, HubSpot’s acquired this company. You know, every time we have one of these podcasts, we’re talking about some type of AI. But truthfully, I think marketers are bored of hearing of AI. And I wonder if they just sense that we’ve got some bits working. We know that’s great for us. Actually, we’re a little bit scared of all the other capabilities that can happen. One, we don’t have the investment to do these big Salesforce Einsteins to get it working. And so that’s why, you know, they’re kind of backtracking a little bit to be like, we’re using it, maybe not as much as we should, but we’re comfortable where we are at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting time. I mean, we’re seeing at the moment AI plateauing in terms of its capabilities. It’s not doing a crazy increase. Now what gives the real benefit is intelligent use of AI. I mean, I find it interesting, you know, the analyst Tony Hayes, he said that traditional agencies will be obsolete in 24 months. Obviously, I don’t believe that. And actually, I find a lot of our work now is around AI and helping clients implement and use AI or helping clients build strategies around, for example, GEO. So, I mean, to me, yes, AI is going to have an impact and yes, a lot’s going to be done by AI, but I just don’t see there ever being a marketing system where you have a single button that has super auto on it, and you click that and all your campaigns work magically. We just know that doesn’t work.
Hannah: I fully agree, Mike. And, you know, we don’t know what the future holds, but there’s many elements of marketing that can’t be done by AI. And I think sometimes we have to accept that that is the future. We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to evolve, but we’re not going to go obsolete.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And if you dig down into Tony’s report as well, some of the optimizations were down at 4%, which is important if you’re running a big campaign, but it’s not necessarily changeable. And it’s certainly not always going to be what a human can do. So, I think as long as we remain a bit paranoid, there’s always going to be work for marketers and always be work for agencies because There’s just not the ability in AI to get everything you can get with a human. What we are going to see is that I think our clients are going to demand more and more from us because of AI. I mean, in fact, that’s a conversation we’re already having.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let’s move on, Mike, because I do want to talk about AI once again, but a slightly shift to a different platform. And this is Adobe. Now, Adobe actually announced last week that they are going to introduce a general availability of AI agents. And it’s really focusing on optimizing two areas. It’s customer experiences and marketing campaigns. Now, I’ve not used Adobe much in the past. It’s not a platform that I’ve been very experienced with. But what about you? Do you think it’s really going to be able to make an impact? I also think, you know, I’d like to add that they do seem a little bit behind the times. This is probably the last platform we’ve seen announce suddenly an AI agent. And it seems like a lot of the big players are actually ahead of the game.
Mike: I think it’s difficult. I mean, obviously, putting new features into a large platform is much more difficult than putting them into a, you know, a small, more dynamic start-ups platform. So I don’t think we can really give Adobe a hard time for, you know, perhaps being behind some of the smaller platforms. I actually like what Adobe’s done. And I’d be interested to hear your view on this, Hannah, because rather than create like a magic AI agent that does everything, you know, if we go back to this previously, you know, one AI is going to take over everything. Actually, what they’ve done is they’ve got AIs to do very specific things. So, for example, understanding and orchestrating customer journeys. And there’s an AI just for that. There’s an AI just to build better audiences. And to me, that’s where AI can really work. If you look at where AI is delivering great results, I think it is where it’s tweaked to specialize in a certain area. Because then you can put the guardrails on, and you can stop AI going crazy. I mean, what do you think?
Hannah: I have to say, Mike, I do agree. I love it. And maybe I was being a little bit harsh on Adobe at the start. I mean, if we just drill into a couple of their agents, you know, they talk about data insight agents. We’re using AI internally at the moment to help some of our clients with data enrichment. We know that works. You know, things like journey agent, they look at how to simplify the creation of customer journeys and the touch points and the content that needs to go along with it. We know that this is really going to help marketers. I would be really interested to see if it is a, you get access to all the agents, if they’re going to put paid walls behind each of them. So that it’s, okay, you can have access to this, but you want access to this really great one? We’ll have a bit more money, please. But I have to agree is a really good way of doing it and actually different. I mean, Salesforce and Einstein is similar, but Einstein seems to be this big hub where these seems to be really specific based on, as you said, you know, specific marketing activities.
Mike: Yeah, and it’s obviously difficult to know how these are going to play out in the long term. I mean, I do think we’ve talked a lot about AI today. I don’t know if you saw MIT released a research report that said that 95% of corporate AI initiatives failed. They weren’t actually carried on. I mean, I think if we look in marketing, we’re way ahead of that. A large percentage of AI initiatives, I think, work. And they may work at 4% uplift, they may work at 60, but certainly AI is definitely benefiting marketing. And to me, it’s interesting. I think for all the questioning, and everyone hypes it up and then thinks, oh no, maybe it’s overhyped. Actually, it’s starting to deliver real results. And I think that’s really important. I think we need to get to the point where we’re not talking about AI improving a marketing automation campaign. We’re talking about the platform improving it. And you’re right, it’d be interesting because obviously you’ve got all these fragmented agents in Adobe. You know, you could see somebody in Adobe in a board meeting going, yeah, we need subscriptions for each of them. And we need to charge people for everything they use. And that could be an interesting model. And we talked about ease of use and simplicity, maybe people only want to see what they want to use and turn off stuff they don’t need. But I suspect that Adobe is going to follow the route that most people have gone, which is to bundle everything into the platform, you pay a platform fee. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this all works out. But I think more and more, we’re going to see these features actually be less AI, and much more just the platform and what it does.
Hannah: I couldn’t agree more Mike, absolutely. But I’m really conscious of time so let’s move on because I just want to do a little bit of a shout out to Dreamforce. Now this is Salesforce’s big event that’s happening in October, and I’d be really interested because we’ve obviously never been as an agency. I don’t know quite what it’s like, but I have to say I had a scroll on their webpage and the first thing that stuck up to me was that Metallica and Benson Boone are playing, so that would be great for the attendees. But in all seriousness, I don’t know, what do you think about the event?
Mike: I think you’re teasing me because you know I’ve never been a Metallica fan. But yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. We’ve never been. I think it’s really hard. You know, COVID has meant that actually going to these events, they probably have less value because so much more is available online. I remember going every year to Inbound. And now I’m going maybe every three or four years. And you still get value from it. And they’re great events, but it’s just hard to justify all the travel time and all the time at the event where, I’m going to be honest, some of the presentations are awesome. Some of them are a bit Metallica. Sorry, Metallica fans. So, you know, I think it’s interesting to see that Dreamforce has really, really succeeded. Inbound has grown. We talked about this earlier in the year when Inbound moved across to the West Coast. But still, there is a group of people that want to spend that time, despite the fact that this is all about tools to do digital marketing. I mean, you’re younger than me. Do you think that events are past it and have had it? Or do you still see that people are going to want to go to Dreamforce? Do you want to go?
Hannah: See, I would love to go, just for Metallica, obviously. No, I think in all seriousness, it’s harder for us. We’re obviously based in England; we’re down on the South Coast. You know, if we were perhaps in America, it might be easier for us to get there. I would be really interested to know the demographics of the audience. You know, where have they come from? Is it loads of people are traveling from across Europe? Or actually, is it a big audience just from the USA? I think they have some real benefit. I do think… these events and I actually saw it for the HubSpot Inbound event as well recently is they’re getting all these big speakers or these people that you’re like they have nothing to do with marketing and you’re like are they really having to go this far to actually encourage attendees so I’ll be really interested to hear feedback and you know if any of our listeners are going or when you listen to this episode you’ve already gone please do reach out because we’d love to know your thoughts.
Mike: Yeah, I’m not sure you can really criticise them for getting the entertaining speakers, the speakers that people want to go to personally. I do remember you being rather excited one inbound when Michelle Obama was talking.
Hannah: That’s very true. I have fallen prey to that before. But let’s move on, Mike, because I know you have quite an interesting, insightful tip of the week around GDPR and data. Do you want to share a little bit more?
Mike: Yeah, so it’s interesting. I mean, with a lot of our clients around their market automation campaigns, we’ve actually been doing some data enrichment. It seems to be something people want to do. I think it’s a reflection of the fact it’s harder to get form fills now. And a lot of the form fills tend to have fake data in. So, we’re doing a lot to clean up incorrect data and also to add new contacts to databases. And before people freak out, this is all GDPR compliant. What isn’t GDPR compliant, and I think this will be a shock, particularly to some people in the States, is that there’s actually a legal requirement to keep your data up to date. And if you leave old data in a database, you are technically breaking GDPR and risking fines. And I don’t think people understand that. Everyone gets worried about, you know, sending emails when they’re not allowed to or people have opted out. But GDPR is much broader than that. And data protection is much broader than that. So, to me, my insightful tip of the week is clean your data up and don’t go to jail.
Hannah: brilliant tip of the week. And we’re even doing that internally. So, we’re following that as well.
Mike: Yeah. And obviously, I mean, if people are listening, it’s unlikely you go to jail for this. But there is a risk of fines, particularly for large corporations. So, I would say that it is quite important. And I think at some point, there will be issues with companies who get hacked and have data they should have removed. And when that happens, there’ll be fines dished out. And then the other thing, it comes back to ease of use. I’ve worked with clients that have held a lot of obsolete data in. And when you do that, it’s really hard to segment. You’ve got a lot of rubbish; you’re trying to look through things. And so actually having a much simpler set of data that’s clean and accurate and has all the information you need. So, spend money on making a smaller amount of data be more effective. I think that’s a great way to go and it really helps, you know, manage your marketing automation campaigns.
Hannah: I think that is a brilliant bit of advice to end the episode on today, Mike. So, thank you as always for such an insightful discussion.
Mike: Thanks very much, Hannah. Looking forward to talking to you again very soon.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
