Outfit your marketing for success

Understand what’s coming: Gartner Top Marketing Predictions 2019

In 2019, consumers will find new ways to engage with technology. Organizational shifts and tightening regulatory requirements call for fresh marketing tactics, and automation will be essential for a winning strategy.

Explore the four key forces that will shape marketing this year

Capture attention like it’s going out of style: Embrace short media forms

Today’s video media landscape is fragmented and in flux. How consumers view video is highly variable across devices and apps, shows and programs.

On the runway: Video ads resized

Appetites for video show no signs of fading, but the way consumers watch may change.

20 %

15 seconds

6 seconds

Gartner Prediction 1

Gartner Prediction 2

By 2023, consumers will watch 20% fewer minutes of video advertising per day than today. Brands embracing short-form video ads need to adapt.

2019

2023

By 2020, national TV cable and broadcast networks will widely adopt nontraditional break structures, varying pod length, placement and total ad load. More short-form 15-second and 6-second ad units will appear.

What we found

U.S. adults spend an average of nearly six hours per day watching video. Where they’re watching:

U.S. advertisers will spend about $77 billion on video advertising

Consumers have dozens of options for watching video content.

The video advertising market is also highly competitive.

to reach consumers with video this year, excluding social platforms.

This makes the markets for consumer attention and subscription fees competitive and fragmented. More viewers use ad-free subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.

Ad buyers have plenty of choices — although many inventory pools have limited reach and/or capabilities.

TV-connected devices

Phone/computer/ tablet

80%

13%

What it means

Meet the Expert

Eric Schmitt

Eric Schmitt has decades of experience with data-driven advertising and marketing innovation. Mr. Schmitt’s areas of expertise include TV and digital advertising, marketing data and analytics, audience identity, targeting, campaign measurement, privacy, attribution, database marketing, customer modeling and analytics, segmentation, SaaS, CRM and marketing automation.

Senior Director Analyst

See the next force

Hear our experts live and learn more about these trends at

Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo 2019

April 29 – May 1 | San Diego, California

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The share of consumer viewing devoted to ad-free subscription services is likely to increase, leading to shorter commercials that cater to shorter attention spans.

Will shorter ads and all-digital creative production and distribution offer cost savings? Probably not. The overall cost of managing cross-platform video and TV campaigns will likely increase due to factors like variance in ad formats and ad operations, and measurement complications.

70%

After initial resistance, traditional ad sellers will embrace the Google-driven shift to shorter ads. And they’ll use the growing scarcity of premium ad inventory, coupled with dynamic ad insertion and granular targeting, to justify pricing those shorter ads on par with traditional 30-second spots.

Q3 & Q4

Q1 & Q2

2017

2017: YouTube notes that one in three large customers uses 6-second bumpers to get their message across quickly, a 70% increase in adoption over the first half of the year.

Use short spots to create awareness and recall, to set the stage for future interactions, or as a hook or call to action for follow-up in digital channels like search and social.

Consider how to leverage generative AI in the context of 6-second spots. Think granular content elements, assembled dynamically to match the audience target.

Complement other advertising and marketing campaigns.

Take advantage of dynamic content and learning algorithms.

What you should do

Get to the point.

Get comfortable with video ads that:

Six-second ads can’t tell a long story. Successful short-form creative must get the message across with scarce real estate.

Dress for success: Prepare for organizational shifts

Shifts occurring within the organization threaten to throw marketers off balance. CX as a guiding company virtue has spurred marketers to invest in a diversity of CX initiatives.

By 2022, profitability will replace customer experience as the CMO’s No. 1 strategic priority, reducing investment in marketing-funded CX programs by at least 25%.

2019

2022

Gartner Prediction 3

This season: CMOs can’t afford to be out of step with the CEO’s No. 1 priority — growth.

What we found

CX program investments remain strong, but CMOs have yet to prioritize metrics that demonstrate the value CX delivers, such as cost of acquisition, retention and churn rates.

CMOs must align marketing programs with business success. An inability to link CX programs with financial outcomes will result in CMOs withdrawing investment from poorly defined programs.

What we found

18%

Our CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019 indicates that CMOs are still confident in their strategic focus and investment in CX as a concept.

of CMOs rated CX as one of the top three capabilities vital to the marketing strategy.

But there’s growing evidence that CMOs are failing to either grasp or act upon CX’s main purpose — to attract and retain satisfied, profitable customers who become strong advocates.

In short, CMOs can’t afford to be out of step with the CEO’s No. 1 priority: Growth. Loosely defined CX investments, with no clear link to business value, will either disperse to other parts of the enterprise or dissipate altogether. As analytics capabilities strengthen, ROI and profitability will come to the fore as the CMO’s strategic priority.

among key stakeholders in the enterprise. Focus on how programs are delivering sustained financial benefits.

Promote CX success clearly

What you should do

Ewan McIntyre covers marketing leadership and management. Mr. McIntyre is focused on how next-generation marketing organizations and leaders allocate resources and budgets to deliver measurable, optimized performance in a digitally led world. He has a deep understanding of how to build the right team, combining in-house and outsourced resources, having built from the ground up multidiscipline digital teams in both the B2B and B2C spaces.

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Ewan McIntyre

Meanwhile, the appetite for data creates a desperate need for analysts and data scientists who can turn mountains of information into meaningful insights.

Yet executive scrutiny of investments in both CX and marketing analytics is intensifying. This leaves marketers on the hook to prove the value of these programs.

25%

CX continues to dominate the CMO’s strategic priorities, but many fail to recognize its intrinsic link to commercial realities of customer acquisition, retention and growth.

of the total marketing expense budget is dedicated to CX programs and capabilities.

To link CX with business success, CMOs need to:

Elevate indicators of CX success to their strategic dashboards.

Employ leading — not lagging — indicators of CX success.

30%

between the leading indicators of CX success (i.e., NPS scores) and lagging indicators of business success (revenue and profitability).

Create a clear link

What we found

Marketing analytics teams are highly skilled, but are wasting resources. Instead of focusing on higher-value activities, like using data and insight to demonstrate business value, the majority of teams say integrating and formatting messy data consumes much of their time.

Expensive, talented resources are misaligned. Data scientists perform basic activities, like data visualization and data preparation, in more than 45% of marketing organizations.

Marketing analytics still has widespread support from the C-suite.

What it means

62%

Marketing analytics continues to garner a great share of the total marketing budget.

of respondents plan to spend more on marketing analytics in 2019.*

Overcoming these barriers is key to ensuring that marketing analytics doesn’t get defunded in the next five years:

Data management, data integration and formatting. A majority of teams still spend the most time on foundational tasks that could easily be automated.

Marketing analytics stands to gain as the C-suite recognizes the importance of having an enterprisewide data strategy and vision, but leaders also face the challenge of an ever-expanding role. They will be charged with duties beyond marketing data, like identifying opportunities for competitive advantage, improving customer experience and innovation.

by working with your IT team. Manage data across your marketing technology products, where possible, and evaluate opportunities to use APIs in instances where not possible.

to managing marketing analytics. Design flexible, adaptable teams of multidisciplinary marketing analysts capable of delivering rapid results.

Develop an approach for marketing data management

Adopt a nimble approach

What you should do

Click to reveal Gartner Prediction 4

By 2023, 60% of CMOs will slash the size of their marketing analytics departments by 50% because of a failure to realize promised improvements.

Gartner Prediction 4

Out of fashion: Analytics teams shrink

Click to reveal Gartner Prediction 3

Lizzy Foo Kune specializes in marketing data & analytics and advertising, focusing on customer data management, marketing dashboard technology and reporting processes, attribution modeling, programmatic advertising, and hiring and managing marketing analytics teams. Ms. Foo Kune helps clients demonstrate business value through marketing data analysis.

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Lizzy Foo Kune

50%

Analytics skills are at a premium. Marketing leaders report that their most challenging skill set to recruit for is analytics.

of CMOs say they’ll increase budget for marketing and customer analytics in 2019.

Average marketing analytics team growth 2015-2018.

Full-time employees

Misaligned resources. Marketing analytics leaders are hiring expensive, talented resources and then failing to maximize their use of these skill sets.

Effectively managing a massive — and growing — team. Marketers plan to add more resources. Half of the marketing analytics leaders we surveyed plan to hire for customer analytics and data science skills in the coming year.

62%

Yet despite growing C-suite support, marketing analytics teams haven’t made much progress in advancing their overall maturity.

In the Gartner 2018 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey, 66% of marketers ranked themselves at “intermediate” Level 3 or below out of 5 on Gartner’s Data-Driven Marketing Maturity model.

To rationalize huge investments in marketing analytics (aka show ROI), the function must grow more advanced and more sophisticated. Yet, a number of barriers hold teams back.

Outsource and automate

(or quit doing altogether) high-effort, low-impact tasks like data cleansing and custom reporting.

Customer data transparency is the new black: Win under regulatory pressures

Firms that use privacy as a brand attribute will outcompete in customer satisfaction and loyalty ratings.

By 2021, organizations that bought compliance risk insurance and are caught lacking in privacyprotection will pay 100% more in compliance cost than best-practice-adhering competitors.

By 2021, at least 60% of major European brands will have adopted a common data wallet interface to enable user-level control over personal data.

Customer churn

60%

40%

Gartner Prediction 5

Gartner Prediction 7

In vogue: Privacy, privacy, privacy

What we found

and/or exposed customer data risk significant customer defections or decreases in engagement.

to be transparent about the data they collect and to enable customers to manage and edit that data.

that make it easy for brands to enable customers to view and manage personal data using a simple and consistent user interface.

Regulations force businesses

Companies found to have violated privacy promises

Firms that use privacy

Vendors offer solutions

What it means

GDPR, enacted in May 2018, created urgency among brands with customers in the European Union. This urgency led to a defensive attitude: Meet the compliance deadline to reduce the risk of fines for their failure to establish the minimum requirements of data transparency for European consumers.

Brands that embrace data transparency — such as Apple and Google — need not give up the use of customer data to promote products, drive engagement and increase sales.

However, some CMOs and marketing leaders recognize that customer data transparency represents an opportunity to position their company as a customer advocate, while portraying competitors as privateers who use customer data to serve their own financial interests.

that offer transparency on use of personal data and give control to the customer.

of customer data you collect and retain, balancing the assessment of risk (e.g., improper usage, a data breach) against potential commercial value.

Experiment with self-service portals

Create an economic valuation

What you should do

Charles Golvin specializes in how all manner of connected devices impact strategies and create opportunities for marketing leaders, from today’s personal handheld devices to tomorrow’s Internet of Things.

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Charles S. Golvin

First, digital advertising created a flood of customer data. Next, companies pounced on that data and used it to try and boost sales.

Then came consumer advocates expressing concern about data-powered overreach, leading to government regulators clamping down and outlawing many common marketing practices. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was the first instance of this regulatory fervor that continues to spread globally.

What’s next? Smart marketers can use data transparency and privacy protection to build their brands. And they must figure out how to convince customers to part with their data on their terms.

25%

Gartner Prediction 5

Lifetime value

With privacy protection

Without privacy protection

Brands that put in place user-level control of marketing data will reduce customer churn by 40% and increase lifetime value by 25% in 2023.

as a brand attribute receive customer satisfaction and loyalty ratings significantly higher than their competitors.

Showing customers the data you collect creates an opportunity to clearly explain how this data benefits them, from understanding their personal preferences to offering greater convenience and increasing awareness of complementary products and services. All of these contribute to greater loyalty and the possibility of higher LTV.

What we found

Percentage of marketers who said their marketing is mostly event-triggered:

Multichannel marketing maturity, driven by greater automation, is rising and close to overcoming batch- and-blast techniques.

In our Marketing Technology Survey 2018, event- triggered/real-time campaigns and artificial intelligence/machine learning were the top two technologies marketers believed would have the largest positive impact over the next five years.

59%

2015

What it means

Integration and data harmonization investments pave the way for marketing teams to adopt AI and machine learning, rather than idling as yet another advanced, but far from fully leveraged, feature.

Indicators of advanced multichannel marketing maturity using AI and machine learning include:

Targeted opportunities across channels

Respond to the hype around algorithmic solutions for campaign management by planning and executing business-relevant pilot projects and ensuring that final content and customer experience won’t suffer.

as data scientists, dashboard creators or data integrators prepare for reduced labor needs in campaign management.

to ensure that predictive deployment actually delivers improved CX.

along with other customer data integrations to ensure your algorithmic campaign design approach offers appropriate transparency.

Retrain quantitatively inclined marketers, designers and analysts

Establish a clear customer satisfaction baseline

Invest in algorithm-accessible consent management

What you should do

By 2023, autonomous marketing systems will issue 55% of multichannel marketing messages based on marketer criteria and real-time consumer behavior, resulting in a 25% increase in response rates.

Gartner Prediction 9

55%

Ready to wear: Automation amplifies multichannel

On click reveal Gartner Prediction 8

Senior Director Analyst

See next force

Meet the Expert

Ewan McIntyre

What we found

Media production companies and AI providers report that AI-assisted production can shorten a 10- to 30-day video production cycle to 24 hours.

Tool providers are enhancing creative suites with AI tools to assist with design and production tasks, including generating realistic 3D scenes and objects.

Major brands report that using AI to generate email subject lines increases open rates and click rates by up to 50%.

What it means

One of the biggest barriers to the marketing dream of effective personalization at scale is the expense and time required to create content. AI research, specifically generative content creation, is targeting this bottleneck.

It will also create new challenges for marketing organizations and agencies because these techniques force them to re-evaluate not only their approach to creativity, but the meaning of their brands.

and formalize constraints on brand voice and imagery. Quantify ROI on creative AI investments with testing and benchmarking.

Reassess your needs and possibilities in light of new automation capabilities. Run pilots to test the generation of expensive assets, like video, from other media types.

Develop a scalable test-and-review capacity

If your organization struggles with content creation:

What you should do

By 2022, content creators will produce more than 30% of their digital content with the aid of AI content-generation techniques, increasing productivity and advertising effectiveness but also disrupting the creative process.

30%

Gartner Prediction 8

Off the rack: Content creation gets a boost from AI, helping to drive personalization at scale.

On click reveal Gartner Prediction 9

Andrew Frank specializes in best practices for data-driven marketing, including how organizations can use data to drive sales, loyalty, innovation, brand value and other business goals. He also focuses on emerging marketing technology and trends, including marketing applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, algorithmic marketing, and marketing among Internet of Things (IoT).

Distinguished VP Analyst

Meet the Expert

Andrew Frank

Weave it in: Disruptive automation

If there’s one force that threatens to disrupt the marketing, it’s machine intelligence. This technology is core to nearly every category of martech, and continues to find its way into new areas.

Vendors promise that their AI will increase marketer efficiency, delivering the optimal communication to their prospects and customers at the moment of maximal influence. This will greatly affect not only what marketing teams and their partners do, but also how they do it.

AI generated

Companies are actively researching generative AI techniques that can synthesize realistic video, audio, images and text.

50%

Generative content shows clear signs of being able to blow content wide open by replacing costly production processes with generative ones. Although performers’ unions and production companies might object, they’re unlikely to impede major improvements in efficiency and cost savings.

An increased ability to test variants will also boost effectiveness and substantially change the economics of advertising and content marketing.

Although we’re not forecasting the wholesale replacement of creative departments or talent with robots, the role of humans in the creative process will shift.

Companies that can crack the code on how to balance human creative and marketing skills with autonomous generative algorithms will gain substantial competitive advantage over competitors.

and seek out skills and tools that can produce breakthrough outputs. from these combinations.

Plan for hybrid creative teams that pair humans with machines

Quantify the impact of accelerating and scaling up content creation using AI on your personalization, advertising and content marketing plans.

If your organization has a mature content-creation practice:

2017

2019 (expexted)

43%

38%

Benjamin Bloom’s experience spans customer engagement, direct response, CRM, data management, analytics, web development and brand marketing roles, as both a consultant/strategist and client-side team leader. He has developed and optimized marketing campaigns, as well as selected and implemented technology and advertising solutions, for over 10 years.

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Benjamin Bloom

Connected customer data

Algorithms supplanting rule-based channel selection for greater responsiveness

Revised reporting approaches, including visualizations and suggested actions

New services are competing for consumer market share. New ad inventory pools are opening, offering audience universes that have meaningful scale.

By understanding the four key forces that will shape marketing’s look for the year, you can tailor your activities to what consumers want and need – enabling you to deliver visible business results.

What we found

What it means

What you should do

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To hold consumer attention, marketers must weave these changes into the fabric of their ad programs and storytelling.

This season: CMOs can’t afford to be out of step with the CEO’s No. 1 priority — growth.

Out of fashion: Analytics teams shrink

Off the rack: Content creation gets a boost from AI, helping to drive personalization at scale.

Ready to wear: Automation amplifies multichannel

What we found

What you should do

What it means

1/3

2/3

What it means

2/3

What we found

1/3

What you should do

3/3

What you should do

3/3

What it means

2/3

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1/3

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Eric Schmitt

18%

62%

Ewan McIntyre covers marketing leadership and management. Mr. McIntyre is focused on how next generation marketing organizations and leaders allocate resources and budgets to deliver measurable, optimized performance in a digitally led world. He has a deep understanding of how to build the right team, combining in-house and outsourced resources, having built from the ground up multidiscipline digital teams in both the B2B and B2C spaces.

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Ewan McIntyre

By 2023, consumers will watch 20% fewer minutes of video advertising per day than today. Brands embracing short-form video ads need to adapt.

Gartner Prediction 1

With privacy protection

By 2023, consumers will watch 20% fewer minutes of video advertising per day than today. Brands embracing short-form video ads need to adapt.

Gartner Prediction 1

What it means

2/3

What we found

1/3

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Eric Schmitt

What you should do

3/3

By 2022, profitability will replace customer experience as the CMO’s No. 1 strategic priority, reducing investment in marketing-funded CX programs by at least 25%.

Gartner Prediction 3

This season: CMOs can’t afford to be out of step with the CEO’s No. 1 priority — growth.

Click to reveal Gartner Prediction 4

Out of fashion: Analytics teams shrink

60%

What you should do

3/3

What it means

2/3

What we found

1/3

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Eric Schmitt

By 2023, 60% of CMOs will slash the size of their marketing analytics departments by 50% because of a failure to realize promised improvements.

Gartner Prediction 4

Out of fashion: Analytics teams shrink

Click to reveal Gartner Prediction 3

This season: CMOs can’t afford to be out of step with the CEO’s No. 1 priority — growth.

What you should do

3/3

What it means

2/3

What we found

1/3

Senior Director Analyst

Meet the Expert

Eric Schmitt

See the next force