Mini-Interview Series: Insights From Juan Mendoza
We keep traveling to MarTech thought leaders, chatting today with Juan Mendoza from Melbourne, Australia!
Introduction: Juan Mendoza
Let’s start with a few words about you.
Juan: My name is Juan. I’m the CEO of The Martech Weekly (TMW). I'm a husband of one and a dad of two young children. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia.
My work in the industry is to give marketing technology leaders insights into how the industry is evolving, how MarTech is constantly changing and what to look out for and pay attention to. We do that through a variety of channels. Our primary channel is The Martech Weekly, free and pro newsletter, which is a digest of MarTech trends.
Second to that is TMW 100, which is our awards program, ranking from 1st to 100th place the most innovative marketing tech companies globally. We give a insights into which companies are building the future of MarTech.
And then, lastly, MarTech World Forum, which is our international event series, where we're gathering senior leaders in the marketing technology domain to talk about and explore where our industry is going across three locations, Melbourne, San Francisco and London.
Retrospective
Reflecting on the past 12 months key developments and trends in the tech industry, what stood out from your perspective?
Juan: The trends that I'm seeing are in three buckets:
the evolution of customer data and composability,
the use of generative AI in customer experience,
and data privacy, its impact on ethics and compliance.
Customer Data
We've been through a very interesting time where we've kind of started with the data management platform (DMP), a piece of software for brands focusing on advertising and managing customer data outside the CRM or marketing automation.
Then came along the customer data platform (CDP), becoming popular back in 2017-2018. The CDP was that piece of technology that centralized and unified a lot of the different desperate data points within a business.
Now I'm seeing this sort of 3rd wave, which is this composability trend that really ratcheted up last year. We had several really interesting companies, including ActionIQ, mParticle and Segment, embracing the warehouse in the cloud. What I’m seeing is that marketing technologists are becoming more sophisticated with how they want to use their data. They want to have more flexibility. They want deeper access. They want to have better analytics and insights. This shift to composability, which is really using technologies around a central data hub, the data warehouse, is taking off. And people are getting a lot of value out of it.
Generative AI
The second trend is, of course, generative AI. I can’t mention trends without talking about it. But generally, it has been most impactful in the customer experience domain. Everything from customer journey planning, using AI to create content from video, text, audio, image, to chatbots and finding proactive ways to help customers. Generative AI applies to so many things.
You can now tell the platform what you want to achieve, as a marketer, and then the generative AI, the large language models, would actually develop that in a way that would actually facilitate a whole campaign or a whole tactical plan for that marketer.
What I'm seeing is more automated marketing, and more automated experiences.
Even in places like personalization and A/B testing, we are getting away from manual testing, and from “hey, we've got a hypothesis, and we want to test it”, to actually using AI to facilitate what would be an ideal experience for a customer.
💡 If the American Privacy Regulation Act (APRA) goes into effect, it is going to change not just the American landscape, but the global landscape, given the amount of data companies that are located headquartered in the United States. — Juan
Data Privacy
Lastly, this trend is not a very fun trend, but it’s really about data privacy, the evolution of consent and data ethics within business.
We've had the GDPR, enforceable since 2018. Now, we have new data privacy bills. For example, the United States government has the American Privacy Regulation Act (APRA), which I call GDPR in the USA.
And if that really goes into effect, it is going to change not just the American landscape, but the global landscape, given the amount of data companies that are located headquartered in the United States.
I'm seeing more privacy enhancing technologies come into the market, like data clean rooms, consent management and syndication platforms, companies like MetaRouter, providing ways to really ensure that your data is secure. You need to know exactly what kinds of consent you are collecting along the way, what are you sharing with when it comes to ad partners.
Hallucination
What is the most common misconception about technology and/or data?
Juan: Everyone knows this, but it’s not about the tools anymore. Having technology in your business is table stakes.
A lot of companies starting to build out their marketing technology practice will buy what the vision pitched by a vendor. And then they realize, oh crap, they forgot to invest in the three people with the skillsets they need to make the vision happen. Or they didn’t organize themselves internally to properly benefit from the tool purchased.
You can have the best technology in your business and get absolutely nowhere because you neglect the people skills, you neglect the alignment and focus on the goals.
I wish, for example, that RFPs would include more often things like “What people do we need? How do we need to organize ourselves to get value and meet our goals?”
In my view, the real value comes out of that ability to focus on finding the right skills, at the right time, and the right people to make this work within a business.
Sight Unseen
What is an overlooked topic you believe deserves more attention and discussions?
Juan: We should spend more time looking at where we are at, in the history of the internet, and where do we actually want to be?
How did the web become so impactful to billions of people around the world? Who pays for the web, the platforms, the apps we use on our smart devices? The majority, like 80% of the web, is paid for by marketers and advertisers. In a way, marketing and advertising have probably the biggest say on the trajectory of the internet.
When we started in the early days, the internet was an open canvas. It was like an infinite field, you can do whatever you want with it. People created websites, new games, etc.
But overtime, the internet has become more and more centralized into a handful of companies. Large social media platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and the likes of Amazon in e-commerce.
The same is happening with devices, look at Apple and Google. Now, all those centralized platforms control the vast majority of the web traffic.
We lost this open field of total creativity, which was great for marketers and advertisers. It’s harder to get web traffic out of these platforms into your own creative space, your own website.
The creativity is declining, because people are just locked into this cycle of convenience with these large platforms. It’s easy to use Google and find a website you might be interested in. It’s easier to check LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram every day than to find forums where you can go and connect with people on really specific things. Marketers are finding themselves trapped into these centralized places. And it keeps becoming more expensive for brands and marketers to use.
As marketers, advertisers, we should be talking about the direction in which we want the web to go in, because most of the web is fueled by marketing and advertising. It’s literally the way these platforms grew, through ad revenue. This remains true to this day.
What future do we want to create for the internet? How do we create a sustainable web where we have more opportunities, more competition, and ultimately more creativity?
🔑 The foundation you need to build is ethics, safety and trust with consumers. That starts with getting data practices in order — Juan
Looking Forward
To ensure success in 2024 and beyond, what are your key recommendations for enterprise tech and data investments?
Juan: Right now, I would say consent. Nothing works until your data privacy program is in place. I don’t think a lot of enterprises realize that if the APRA bill goes through in the United States, there is a very good chance that large enterprises, who are making more than $100 million in revenue, would be audited for their data privacy practices this year.
The foundation you need to build is ethics, safety and trust with consumers. That starts with getting data practices in order. Without that, you can’t build lookalike audiences, you can’t create first-party data for advertising to help grow your brand. Without that, nothing works.
Bonus
What is your most memorable data (or tech) story?
Juan: I had a really interesting conversation a few years ago, I was building an identity strategy for a large enterprise B2C company. They had millions of customer transactions a week and wanted my help to map out everything. Over time, the business found new opportunities, built teams around these, and kept finding more, adding up. At some point, the main stakeholder, head of digital, realized that the business became like Jenga blocks stood up above each other. And if a block is pulled out, it all falls down. The company was managing customer data with a very tactical approach. It bought software for each new use case, and collected data for it. Nothing was integrated.
The problem with SaaS today is that you have a lot of customer data, but all in different systems, hard to keep track of it. It’s a real blocker.
This is what turned me on to composability. For a while, I was very critical of reverse ETL and the composable movement. But since having that experience, I thought to myself, a lot of companies, especially in the enterprise, are blocked because they don’t even know where the data is. It changed my mind on composability, embracing the cloud as a way to try and solve that to unify and harmonize data to make it usable for everyone in the business, not just for specific teams on a very tactical and short timeline to create value for a brand.
💬 Looking to stay in touch with Juan, gain more insights? You can find him on LinkedIn as well as in The Martech Weekly. Meeting Juan in person? It’s possible by joining The Martech World Forum!