By Jordan Turner | 3-minute read | March 25, 2024
Big Picture
Marketing leaders are feeling the pressure to do more with less, which is at odds with their desire for a comprehensive view of the customer. Meanwhile, emerging technologies, such as generative AI, continue to disrupt marketing strategies. To help you stay on the forefront, we dive into three key impeding technology shifts that dominate the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing.
Most industries are aggressively experimenting with AI in martech and with enterprise applications and tools. Although AI powers well-established analytic, predictive, and recommendation or decisioning components that are entrenched in today’s martech landscape, generative AI is responsible for the biggest advancements on this Hype Cycle.
Generative AI for marketing supports the development and testing of new ideas and automates the production of content and creative materials. Special uses of generative AI, such as conversational marketing, use generative models to humanize customer interaction.
Influence AI, emotion AI and visual intelligence are slated between two to 10 years out to maturity. They are powering new approaches to promotion, pricing, customer experience and product design.
Privacy considerations pile on to uncertainty in the regulatory environment, which is already clouding innovation in some areas.
For example, customer data ethics is poised to exit the Innovation Trigger and identity resolution is on the cusp of entering the Slope of Enlightenment, but both remain stagnant due to the uncertainty of privacy laws.
Despite regulatory ambiguity, digital marketing leaders’ heavy reliance on first-party data is unabated, even as rising data management costs threaten to stretch budgets. To increase customer opt-in rates and customer data sharing, marketers must meet customers at the right time in their journey and continue to nurture trust.
Seventy-five percent of CMOs report facing pressures to cut technology spending.
Source: Gartner
Superapps entered the Hype Cycle near the Peak of Inflated Expectations as users demand powerful, easy-to-use mobile-first experiences.
Superapps have proven popular across the globe, especially in Asia and Latin America, as they provide a single gateway for multiple customer interactions across social media, e-commerce and advertising, with shared customer data across each. Adoption in the U.S. has been slower.
Superapps are an opportunity to simplify or streamline digital experience or multiple apps into a cohesive experience.
“With just two to five years out from maturity, generative AI is a transformational technology for digital marketing and has profound business impacts, including on content discovery, creation, authenticity and regulations. Its rapid ascent will continue to impact the future of marketing technologies.”
3 things to tell your peers
Marketing leaders are pressured to do more with less, which is at odds with their own desire for a comprehensive view of the customer.
Generative AI lights up the Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, which puts marketing leaders’ roadmaps on a new trajectory.
Investment in customer data management and integration grows as the number of channels that marketing leaders use to acquire and engage customers increases.
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Claudia Ratterman is a Director Analyst for Gartner for Marketers, based in Los Angeles, CA. For the last 16 years, Claudia has been helping brands achieve business results by providing actionable, objective insight around Social Media Marketing.
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