81% of marketers anticipate that during the next five years, IT staff will become more involved in marketing initiatives. With that function comes an obligation from both teams about marketing ROI accountability: IT staff should be held more accountable for marketing ROI, according to 96% of marketers and 89% of IT directors.
This is according to a report titled Marketing and IT: The Strategic Partnership, published by Lytics, a customer data platform (CDP), in which 250 top marketers and IT leaders were polled.
A convergence of trends, such as the decline of the third-party cookies and the development of first-party data collecting, has prompted a merger of the two teams. Marketers now leverage first-party data from a variety of sources to inform all of their segmentation and targeting, including their website, mobile app, CRM, ecommerce platform, and point-of-sale (POS). Marketers must rely on their IT team to acquire insights from data, which is often held in a data warehouse and is mostly inaccessible to them. 75% of marketers polled stated IT teams are responsible for providing them with data for their operations, and nearly 70% said they rely on IT teams for data modeling.
“Marketing is becoming even more data-centric, because it is the foundation for practically everything they will do in the future,” said Lytics president Jascha Kaykas-Wolff. “Marketers must collaborate with IT to use and protect it, as well as to comply with expanding legislative laws.”
As marketing becomes more tech-enabled, IT teams are becoming more involved in selecting technology providers and marketing products. 76% of IT teams polled claimed they assist marketers in selecting technology and SaaS vendors. Customer data platforms (73%) and artificial intelligence (66%) are at the top of marketers’ procurement wish lists, followed by blockchain and smart contracts (53%). Surprisingly, just about 40% of marketers intend to use Unified ID (UID) technology. IT is even less enthusiastic about UID, with only 22% expecting to implement it over the next five years.
Despite the fact that 66% of marketing leaders (and 67% of IT leaders) intend to integrate AI into the marketing stack, many are unaware of its function in marketing. One priority is to target. The majority of marketers, 64%, believe that AI will do the most of the heavy lifting in ad targeting in the future. Marketers see AI’s greatest value to be the automation of marketing chores, followed by making their ad spend more efficient (40%). Only 35% of marketers plan to employ AI to inform ad creative.
“The usefulness of data in marketing is dependent on accessibility,” Kaykas-Wolff noted. “Given that over 75% of marketers plan to invest in a CDP within the next two years, and nearly 60% want to hire data analysts, it’s apparent that marketers want ready-access and will take steps to achieve it.”