Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Russ Glass’s LinkedIn profile. Learn more about publishing long-form content to your own LinkedIn profile here.
This is the year when personalization will reach scale and deliver real and lasting value to customers.
It might seem like too lofty of a prediction to make, given that the promise of true one-to-one marketing has gone unfulfilled in the history of the internet so far. But given certain unstoppable market trends, like the fact that processing power per dollar continues to rise and storage costs continue to decline, I think the time is at hand.
The new year isn’t quite new anymore, but here are six trends I already see unfolding.
Ad tech and marketing tech won’t just collide – they will fuse.
If you imagine a graph upon which the vertical axis represents personalization and the horizontal axis represents scale, marketing automation has historically occupied the upper-left corner, since it’s been highly relevant to individuals but really hard to scale, while ad-tech companies, for whom scale is easy but relevancy is tough, sit in the lower-right corner.
But due to the factors I touched on earlier, it’s getting exponentially easier to find signal in all the noisy data that abounds from the traces people leave on the web. In other words, scale and personalization are no longer mutually exclusive and marketing automation will finally scale in 2015.
