Innovation Over Ice: Products Will Find You
In the third and final theme from our happy hour conversation with Mark McKenna (CEO at Instapage), Steven Wong (Cofounder and Co-CEO at Ready State), and Mark Wenneker (Founder of Sheet Metal Arts, CCO in Residence at Winter Sun) we hypothesize on what the next decade might look like for marketers.
In previous posts we discussed that taste is fundamentally human and how the potential of AI far outweighs the anxieties around it (when it comes to marketing). In this summary we talk about where we go from here.
While nobody can be certain what the future looks like, the potential for disruption is clear. And that disruption will likely come in the form of extreme personalization. While not all marketers agree that the industry needed to be disrupted, at Winter Sun we believe that when things evolve to better meet what customers need, it is a change in the right direction.
Key Theme #3: In the future, products will find you.
Marketing is going to evolve significantly over the next 5-10 years with a greater focus on enablement, speed, and personalization. Generative AI is laying the groundwork for companies to focus more on the product itself and the technologies needed to help match the right products to the right people in a meaningful way. As true personalization at scale becomes a reality, creative will live inside martech stacks with more focus on relevance and less on broad awareness marketing.
Excerpt from our conversation on February 10…
Owen
What does marketing look like in ten years? What do you think? Assuming a lot of these models have evolved to level of high degree of autonomy with some curation, where do you see sort of that function evolving into?
Mark W
I don't know how important marketing is going to be in five years. Maybe that's the place to start. I don't know how important it's going to be to tell people that we have products and get people to get excited about those products. I think there's going to be I just don't know if that's going to be as important. I don't know if we'll see any Super Bowls.
I think people are going to want to put more money into the product they're making and less into the marketing. That's my gut. It feels like if I'm a marketer, that's what I'd want my money to do. There's already just massive change, like in automotive. There's not going to be dealerships in five years. That'll be totally different. And it's going to be easier for people to go figure out how to get what they want. So they're going to not have to rely on a lot of traditional things that we're used to.
Owen
Things will find you. You won't have to find things anymore.
Mark W
Yeah, exactly. I just think marketing is not going to be that important. That's my guess. But like somebody said, Jesus was basically a great marketer. The stories have been told a million different ways from the beginning, and stories will keep getting told. I just don't know if people are going to want to hear that many around products as much anymore. I just don't know how important that's going to be. I got a five year plan to get out.
Owen
There you go. All right, Steven. Love to hear your thoughts.
Steven
I think in five years, agencies like us will be dedicated to helping our clients integrate these creative functions within the client technology. So their MarTech stacks will live very much inside their organizations and we'll be setting them up, maybe training them. And in ten years, who knows?
Owen
Yeah, like the engine will just kind of run itself a bit.
Steven
Well, completely in stream. The creator will be generated, personalized, delivered entirely in the stack.
Owen
Perfect way to end with Mark. That's a lot of what your firm has done for a portion of the funnel.
Mark M
Yeah, I think speed comes to mind. Right, in five years. Now it's ‘get the right data at the right time, change the creative’. I just think all that stuff is going to be automated, and any type of advertising is going to be very organic and very automated. Part one is speed. Number two is there's no doubt the personalization thing is going to take another big leap here. And that not only are products going to find you, but they are going to be already tailored for you. If you just think about, like, sneakers. I think that I have a wide foot, but it's hard to find wide shoes.
I'm only going to see wide shoes, and I don't have to go hunt and peck for them. It's coming to me, no doubt about it. So you got speed, you got what we consider personalization today.
Owen
Relevance is going to be taken on to a whole other level.
Mark M
Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And then I just think that there's way less guesswork. Like, even today, as much advancement as we've made with data, it can be way better than it is today. Way better. That's my view on five years. I do still think there'll be marketing jobs out there. I think there'll be fewer roles out there. No doubt. I think, like copywriting and whatnot. Especially lower level jobs. I think they'll be gone. But those are the themes that I would pick for five years out.