'We'll Never 100% Go Back' to the Way Marketing Used to Be: Oracle CMO Ariel Kelman

It's been said time and time again: 2020 changed everything. From forcing people out of offices and into their homes to transitioning major events like Cannes Lions to virtual ones, businesses have had to rethink and overhaul nearly every aspect of how they operate and interact with consumers. Though vaccines have brought a light to the end of the tunnel, the lessons we learned in 2020 won't be left in the past, said Oracle CMO Ariel Kelman, who is speaking at Adweek's Outlook 2021: The Year Ahead in Marketing and Media virtual event this week. "We’re never getting 100% back to the way things used to be," he said. Instead, we can take what we've learned and apply it for a brighter future. Ahead of the event, we sat down (virtually, of course) with Kelman to discuss the shifts Oracle has made, what he thinks will last, and what's in store for the future. What do you think have been the biggest lessons marketers have learned over the past year?The biggest thing we’ve learned is that we can get work done even if we don’t have live events and personal meetings. We’ve also learned that the digital tools we’ve been experimenting with are actually mission-critical. We’re never getting 100% back to the way things used to be, so we need to really think about how we use those tools in a symbiotic, holistic manner so that we have the most positive interactions possible with our customers. With customers moving most of their business online—in the United States alone, we saw 10 years’ worth of ecommerce penetration growth within just three months—digital interactions are more prevalent than ever. That’s an advantage for digital marketers, but it also makes the buying journey more complex for marketers to follow if they’re using disjointed technologies. 2021 will be about prioritizing marketing investments and removing complexity. Having the right technology in place for advertisers and marketers alike is imperative if we’re going to engage these customers in meaningful ways. What about in your sector in particular?The technology sector has been guilty of developing products with a laser focus on features, rather than with a purpose of helping customers solve real problems. The pandemic has shown us how important it is for all these tools to not only help attract new customers and delight existing ones, but for all of us to be able to access those tools easily, and to learn how to use them without great effort. How have the lessons of the past year charted course for this one?Well, for starters, we’ve learned more about how to structure digital events to make them more focused on specific roles and problems, to make them shorter, and to enable more people to participate. We’ve learned how to make better use of our tools. For example, by unifying back office and front office applications, customer service and other customer-facing employees have more complete information about the people they’re interacting with. So now they can provide better service and potentially generate incremental revenue. We’re adding more analytics and more automation into our tools so that people in multiple roles have more information at their fingertips with which to help customers, while enduring less rote work while in the process of doing it. And we’re taking many of these lessons with us into the physical world. We don’t think people will want to attend huge events anymore, with a something-for-everyone kind of agenda. So even our in-person events are going to be more focused. 2020 was a year of acceleration. What aspects of your business were accelerated, and what will continue to do so in the future?We’ve seen tremendous growth in several key areas. People are more interested in real-time analytics, in tools that are simpler to use and have a high degree of automation and artificial intelligence to help guide employees. Those things really took off in 2020, and I expect to see that continue as we bring more products to market that include those elements. I’m excited to see more and more organizations realize the potential of AI technologies. They will only become more prevalent and more and more useful. This will be especially the case when optimizing ad creative, modeling audiences, providing contextual analysis, and helping customer service agents become more productive and better able to avoid burnout. What do you think we've left in the past, marketing-wise, and won't come with us into the new year?Gathering people together will be as important as ever, but I think we’ve seen the last of the huge CES-type gatherings with everyone and everything under the sun. Due to the economic downturn and the global pandemic, 59% of marketing technology leaders are expecting moderate to severe cuts to their marketing budgets. However, 35% of companies still plan to overhaul their mar-tech stacks, according to Gartner. We have an opportunity to simplify our technology stacks and focus only on technologies that are integrated and help us follow customers on their journey from consideration to adoption to, hopefully, advocacy. What are you excited about, for Oracle and the marketing industry, in 2021?I’m excited to see people using these new tools so they can get more out of the marketing and advertising budgets. I think we’ll also see a more productive and happier workforce as we automate more of the rote, low-value work. And as we’ve seen, even when we’re allowed back in our offices, many of us will choose to work remotely at least some of the time. We’ve seen that at Oracle, where people since the pandemic have been working with a greater sense of purpose than ever, and I’m excited to see that carry over as we enter what I think will be a period of strong and sustained economic growth.