How do marketers embrace genuinely helpful, promising technologies but keep their eye on their business outcomes rather than building the better “stack?” As marketers vet and construct their DMPs, their data, CRM and attribution tool sets, what have they learned from the last decade of digital investment about organizing people and tech around outcomes, not platforms? We ask marketers and their agencies to explore what a martech strategy looks like, and how it can avoid the acronym clutter and gadget-chasing that bedeviled the ad tech era.

Is marketing tech replacing, even subsuming, the ad tech stacks that preceded them? Mediapost’s Online spin columnist and industry veteran contends that the rise of marketing tech signals brands shifting focus from media outcomes to business outcomes. We ask Anheuser-Busch InBev Digital Brand Manager Jonny Silberman about how he is building a mar tech stack and what outcomes he expects from it.

When you market for a small charitable organization that crowdfunds school projects, being tech savvy is not about staying current. It is about leveraging efficiency, deepening relationships between donors and students, and keeping it personal even as you raise hundreds of millions in donations. DonorsChoose.org’s CMO Katie Bisbee shares how she and her company use tech to deploy some of the tactics she learned from the much larger retail sector to maintain human connections across big and small donors and the kids who benefit.

Data is at the center of the new marketing tech vision. But as marketers build, or ponder, data management platforms (DMPs) to merge their disparate inputs, many questions emerge about who owns the data, where it resides and how it is shared across brand, agency, publishers. And there are no one-size solutions. And so we explore some of the emerging models for solving the DMP dilemma, how they map against differing needs and goals. Who should be driving the conversation about data across these relationships? And how has data become part of the currency and deal-making that now goes on among partners?

Email remains the most personal touchpoint between brands and their base. Marketers keep coming back to this simple, oldest of digital tools because it works. But how does the most direct channel to customers work with the emerging marketing cloud to supercharge messaging and itself become a prime input of richer data? And how does the new messaging (mobile and social), get us even closer to that holiest of grails – data-powered, omni-present one-to-one connections with consumers?

The cold calls are relentless. The acronyms are filling the next generation Lumascape. How do marketers put a process in place that keeps the dog wagging the tail rather than vice versa? How do you evaluate partners, ask them the right questions, build a stack of blocks that can be moved (or removed) as strategy, not technology, requires? And how can all of this be done internally without clogging appointment books with pitch meetings and stifling the very productivity all of this aims to accelerate? We end OMMA Marketing Technology with some guidance on first next steps.

Marketers are all publishers now, or so they say when they claim to put “content” at the center of all they do. But what does this mean in practical terms? Content marketing has its own complex subset of marketing tech, from social media analytics and listening tools to blog and CMS platforms, back end metrics, SEO and just writing and image tools. Several years into the content marketing wave what have marketers learned about this tech stack, internal workflow and staffing, and evaluating ROI?

Martech solutions are bringing customer data full bore into the marketing mix to evolve customer relationships and engagement. But what has been the affect of these solutions on small-to-medium-sized businesses? How have SMBs combined Martech solutions with paid search and other digital marketing platforms? BIA/Kelsey’s Rick Ducey will share insights into Martech trends and directions and suggest market opportunities for smaller brands.

One of the oldest industry groups focused on privacy policy reflect on the state data security and ownership in the age of heightened consumer awareness. How are basic concepts around privacy like personally identifiable information themselves being recast as new data points pile into user profiles? How are new devices, personal and intimate, posing unforeseen challenges? And how will the industry respond to new FCC proposals for privacy regulation?