• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 6, 2016

As ad-tech morphs into mar-tech, so too are marketing functions that were previously siloed, according to a panel of email marketing pros debating the “Rise of the Cross Channel Strategist” at the Email Marketing Summit on Amelia Island, FL, this morning.

“At Visa it hasn’t been in isolation,” explained Mary Grundy, vice president-global innovation marketing at Visa, who said the “rise of the mar-tech function” is leading Visa’s entire marketing organization to “work collaboratively.”

The problem she said, is separate teams continue to manage social, “paid digital,” display, email and website marketing, which quite frequently means “our data is siloed, as well.”

“We’re trying to figure out where all the data will live and how we can have these connection points that will allow us to be smarter,” she explained, adding that the process is beginning to improve but still needs to go further.

For example, she noted that Visa now integrates tracking pixels in its email marketing so it can identify users when they show up on Facebook and can be “retargeted” on the social network. As integrated as that experience is, she says there’s still some missing pieces of data integration that doesn’t enable Visa to go further. For example, she said she would like to retarget those users differently if she could see whether they ultimately made a purchase or not, but she cannot currently do that. She implied part of that was due to consumer privacy protocols and business practices related to it.

For Kristie Reeves, senior manager of database marketing for the PGA Tour, the goal is to acquire more data in order to create a “360-degree view of our fan.”

She said the PGA Tour began with more of a B2B focus, but has subsequently shifted more explicitly to consumer marketing and that the focus is aimed more at an audience that “skews older.”

That in turn is leading to some problems when the PGA Tour leverages their behavioral data to target them based on extremely relevant messages. Or what she described as, “the creepiness factor.

“It’s great for our younger fans. Not-so-great for our older fans,” she explained.