New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.

The right approach for SAS was a ground up renovation to better integrate channels and create a new customer-centric view of the market. We needed a way to monitor all of the campaigns in a centralized fashion. This meant creating unified experiences across all channels to deliver to customers the personalized attention they are asking for. And we started by establishing an Analytical Marketing Functional Framework that would serve as the foundational structure.

Last year, the Adobe Digital Trends report showed data-driven marketing to be the top priority for marketers, with 90% of survey respondents citing it as their number one choice.

In line with its infamous proclamation that marketing will be spending more on technology than the CIO by 2017, recent figures from Gartner suggest CMOs will indeed to rivalling IT departments when it comes to technology expenditure this year. According to the analyst firm, the average CMO spending on technology during 2016 was 3.24 per cent of revenue, against 3.4 per cent of revenue for the CIO.

In addition, a new research report from The CMO Club found CMOs increasingly owning the digital strategy – more so than the CIO or technology chief – highlighting marketing’s growing technology role. That survey reported 60 per cent of marketers were defining the need and identifies a digital marketing or technology solution before turning to the IT function to act as implementer, and 13 per cent are also doing the implementations themselves.

The presentation covers an update on the ad tech and mar tech sectors, the growth in M&A activity, and the top five digital advertising and marketing trends.

Marketer's have allocated 12% of company revenue to the marketing expense budget to last year’s 11%.

CMOs have taken on responsibility for aspects of sales, IT and customer experience functions in 30% or more organizations.

27% of the marketing expense budget is now allocated to technology, or 3.24% of revenue in 2016 vs. CIO’s tech budget of 3.4% of revenue.

We’re also seeing a strong correlation between a CMO’s willingness to share in the risk and the size of the budget they’re able to command. 

While the majority of marketing leaders expect budget increases again next year, the percentage of marketers bracing for a cut has grown nearly 5X from this time two years ago.

The 2016 edition of Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report covers today's Internet growth and an in-depth look at the following: • Global Internet us…

"In many ways, modern marketing has more in common with the software profession than it does with classic marketing management. As surprising as that may sound, it's the natural result of the world going digital. Marketing must move faster, adapt more quickly to market feedback, and manage an increasingly complex set of customer experience touchpoints. All of these challenges are shaped by the dynamics of software--from the growing number of technologies in our own organizations to the global forces of the Internet at large.

But you can turn that to your advantage. And you don't need to be technical to do it.

"Hacking Marketing" will show you how to conquer those challenges by adapting successful management frameworks from the software industry to the practice of marketing for "any" business in a digital world. You'll learn about agile and lean management methodologies, innovation techniques used by high-growth technology companies that any organization can apply, pragmatic approaches for scaling up marketing in a fragmented and constantly shifting environment, and strategies to unleash the full potential of talent in a digital age."