2020 marketing predictions from SAS’ Wilson Raj
Digital Marketing Briefing sat down with Wilson Raj, Global Director of Customer Intelligence at SAS, to pick his brains on the future of marketing, encompassing privacy, the blockchain and AI – here are his five things to watch out for in 2020:
- Data privacy & personalisation become C-suite priorities
In 2020, marketers will raise the personalisation bar by raising the data privacy bar. Topics such as data governance, data security and data management will be escalated to C-suite and boardroom level discussions as the balance between customer privacy and personalisation becomes a strategic differentiator for all brands.
2. Blockchain & advertising
In 2020, blockchain technology combined with AI will start to gain traction to help businesses combat digital advertising fraud and waste.
3. Identity management
Identity management will be a primary goal (and struggle) for marketers in 2020. Marketers must be able to identify and track specific digital visitors across a range of channels, devices, platforms and environments as they journey around web, tablet, mobile apps, voice assistants, and AR/VR.
To this end, hybrid-cloud architectures will gain momentum in 2020 to provide dynamic MarTech applications with dynamic customer data, as well as offer management, decisioning engines, analytics platforms and the channels themselves in both real-time and batch capacity.
4. Increased automation with AI
In its annual CMO survey, Deloitte found that despite marketing analytics budgets increasing over the next 3 years, perceived contributions from analytics remain weak.
In 2020, companies must turn to AI-driven automation to help operationalise those analytics if they are to remain competitive. With the deluge of data and proliferation of customer contact opportunities, it is no longer humanly possible to make the thousands of decisions required per second to deliver great CX without automation in the mix.
5. AI & dynamic pricing
AI already helps marketers with dynamic pricing as it relates to product availability, demand and forecasting. But it can go much further in 2020. AI could further integrate with a company’s resource planning systems and supply chain inputs to access cost optimisation, inventory, and economic forecasting data to achieve both dynamic pricing and fulfillment into campaigns and customer interactions.