Brian Solis, Altimeter Group

Royal World Network Beimenn, Maison by Schrodinger, or CRM, but it's actually all these things. And this is, I think, where digital transformation has its greatest promise. And this is what I feel is my purpose, is that no matter where I am, the answer is, you have to start with the customer and the employee in mind. They're different today, and all of those business processes or just the way we make decisions about how to be innovative or how to change often leave them out of the equation. We just take the way we've always done things and apply it to something that's new. And I think the greatest promise of digital transformation is to just maybe take a step back and see, what should we do if we could do it from the beginning in order to be competitive? Because everybody otherwise is going to just do the same things, and therefore there's really no great competitive advantage. It's just using something so promising and new as a commodity. So you mentioned marketing. What are the key things you're seeing that is transforming in digital marketing just now? Digital marketing has been around for 20 plus years now. What is it that's coming together now? What's going on here? Digital marketing and the state of digital marketing is, a lot has changed and a lot hasn't changed. Just like digital transformation, if we don't challenge the convention, if we don't challenge the foundation of which it's built upon, so for example, digital marketing was built upon the foundation of traditional marketing. And so now in a world where you have social and mobile and apps and you have behaviors changing because of all of the new devices and expectations changing and preferences changing, what marketing is trying to do is keep up. But it's doing so based on the disciplines that sort of built up marketing. I think where we see the most sophisticated examples of digital transformation are those organizations that sort of think differently about how they're organized to compete. So for example, the better trends in marketing are those that realize, well hey, there's email, there's SEO, there's mobile, there's social, there's digital, there's all these different things. Why are they all operating independently? Why are they all competing for budget? It's all the same people we're trying to reach. How could we be more effective if we collaborated and also worked in a way that delivered a consistent experience? I think the word experience, like digital transformation, means too many things to too many people. But I do see it as being the source of unity moving forward if we all say, what's that experience we want to deliver? And how does that make someone feel? And then we organize digital marketing and marketing in general around that. You might have something a little bit more meaningful. You also talked about the sort of digital platforms, people, understanding the customer, the team, the craft, the practices. I mean, we're seeing a big revolution in the tooling side of it at this point also, obviously with marketing automation platforms, video marketing platforms, social media platforms. Even just hooking all this stuff together is somewhat complicated at this point. What are you seeing on the sort of tooling front that excites you and what is the downsides of it? Because I guess it's also tough nowadays to keep up with all the marketing stack that exists. Yeah, well I'll tell you this. I stopped tracking the marketing stack. I stopped tracking all technology to some extent that has to involve, that regards scale. And the reason is because it's perpetuating the problem. It takes all of these new promising opportunities and forces you to think about it in ways that allow you to scale it. So it doesn't make you rethink how you use any of it. It just puts you in the same process of stuffing things into the machine to push it out based on a schedule and attach metrics to it. You haven't really challenged your own status quo, yet you think because you're using these tools that you're being innovative. Ask the customer if they care about what stack you're using. They don't care because what they'll say is the same thing. It's meaningless. So we get busy for the sake of being busy and I stopped tracking this so that I could get back and see what do we need to do. If you're gonna scale anything, what would you scale that would matter today? So the perfect team would obviously really know that and have the great tooling. I think tools are enablers. But I think it's a really good point that we're seeing. Last week we saw a customer had 42 different tools in their marketing stack. I mean just keeping up with the subscriptions and the roadmaps and what have not. It's a tough one. So what presently really excites you just now? I mean what's the last three to six months? We live in a world of turmoil and disruption on many levels these days. What is it just the last few months that have gotten you really excited at some point? Really excited about that there is hope and there is future and there's clarity? If it's one thing that I'm excited about it's that the consumerization of all technology is having its moment. It's really starting to, there's a lot to really try to keep up with but it's having its moment where it's crashing over consumerism in ways that are forcing companies to have the kinds of conversations they should have had a long time ago. Nobody likes to change. Sometimes we want to go backwards. I mean that's just exactly what happened in the United States with their new president. But that's not the answer. There's a future. It's going to happen and you have a choice. And so what has me so excited is that if you allow yourself to see where it's going you can be part of it and you have a choice of how you want to be part of it. Do you want to let it affect you or do you want to shape it? And I think that if you can be inspired by how technology is impacting people and what they want to do and how they do it, marketing, business, service, support, products, all these things just have an opportunity to be more relevant and also as a result change how we do business. I mean I don't think many people would just say about every company that they love doing business with these companies. They have a few that they love because those few really try to be great. Everybody else has a reluctant relationship with certain companies and it's just sort of been that way for far too long. So we're in Copenhagen today, a city you've been through a lot in recent years. What's your take on, what's the special sort of Copenhagen challenge in this space? What's the advantage and what's the disadvantage for all the people you're meeting here? Well I'll tell you this. The one thing about Copenhagen that I see is it's not unlike every place I see. The world is a global place, the world is a local place but I always hear people asking, what are you hearing about Copenhagen and what are you hearing about companies around the world? And the answer is there's a lot of it that's just the same. I think we're all just sort of struggling individually as to what's our purpose? Is it directly tied to our country's culture or our city's culture or is it how we work? Is it how we think about things? And it sort of tends to put ourselves, I've noticed, in sort of this questionable standpoint of looking for answers. If it's one thing that I could share with this is that the answers start with you and the answers start with the people you're trying to reach because that's unique to you. Regardless of where you are in the world, just solving for that makes it tangible and approachable. Thanks a lot, Brian, and good luck with your keynote.