Marketing Technology in 2021: How's it looking?

So, widespread lockdowns and vaccine rollouts dominated the news in 2021, but let’s not forget that lots of other things happened.... We had a new US president inaugurated. One of the largest container ships in the world got stuck in the Suez Canal and disrupted global trade. World leaders marked Earth Day and committed to a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. We had the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. DogeCoin, a joke crypto named after a dog, reached a market cap of almost $90bn. Our favourite billionaires from SpaceX and Amazon successfully launched rockets into space. And Facebook just revealed plans for their metaverse under a parent company called “Meta”.

There is now a lot of speculation around how things will play out economically from here though. Stock markets were up to new heights in the last year, yet GDP growth around the world looks to be slowing down. 

Will we see inflation ramp up? Will we see a deflationary scenario? Could the $230bn in extra Australian household savings be the key to a boost in retail spending? Governments and central banks around the world have pumped substantial amounts of money into circulation to support everyday people and keep things going during lockdowns, but it’s unknown what the longer term effects of this are. 

Whatever the case, there are pretty obvious signs of an increasing cost of living. Inflation went up to 3% in Australia and property prices are forecasted to rise 22% during this year alone. The Domain property report revealed that the median house price in Australia is now almost $1 million. I think it’s fair to say we can all ‘feel’ how expensive life is getting and it’s a bit daunting thinking of any interest rate rises in the not-so-distant future.

40% of the workforce seems ready to look for a new job now too - aka the ‘great resignation’. A combination of virus fatigue, Zoom meeting burnout, lack of holidays and realising that life is simply too precious seems to be enough for people to actually leave their jobs - sometimes even with nothing to go to. 

The AFR reports that on one hand, 70% of Australian jobs had wages growth of less than 2 per cent. But on the other hand, we have examples of white collar workers seeing between 10 to 40% increases. Law firm, Gilbert and Tobin, gave it's lawyers a 10% pay rise to retain more key workers, plus the RBA itself has gone on record for trying to stop their staff from being poached!

The war on tech talent here is heating up, as per the IAB’s recent comments. With the borders shut, it means that we have struggled to fill as many specialist tech positions and we are all competing for the same candidates. The AFR reports that the cost of hiring software developers, security specialists and data experts went up by about 30 per cent over the year to June 30.

According to the 2021 State Of the CMO Report though, the biggest area of skills gap was analytics, data and science skills. Multi-channel marketing orchestration and personalisation scored highest on delivering marketing strategies this year, which interestingly was above brand strategy, vision and tactics. 

In Australia, we have some really special things happening here in the tech space. Look at Canva leading global digital design platforms, without even going public yet. Look at Atlassian leading software development around the world. Look at Afterpay trailblazing Buy Now Pay Later. Look at Finder paying staff with BitCoin. Australia is becoming a tech hub! As Afterpay boss Anthony Eisen said we can win the war, “It is the perfect time to attract key talent to Australia.”

And on the topic of BitCoin - over the past year it also reached over a trillion dollars in total value faster than any business or entity in history - including Google, Apple or any big tech firms. It was even accepted as official currency in El Salvador. CommBank is now allowing customers to buy, sell and hold crypto assets like BitCoin through its app. Sports stars are being paid in it and exchange listed companies are putting it on their balance sheets. It’s going mainstream, yet no one actually knows who created it...

Looking at online spending, Australia’s ecommerce market is expected to grow by 13.4% this year off the back of hefty gains in 2020 and is on track to break the $70 billion USD barrier by 2025. The Australian digital advertising market has also shrugged off any pandemic woes with its highest increase of expenditure since 2016, reaching nearly eleven and a half billion dollars in FY21 according to the IAB.

MarTech is in a great place right now too. Martech Alliance has estimated that the Global MarTech Industry is worth almost $345bn. Their MarTech report showed: 

• Almost a quarter (23%) of Marketing budget was spent on MarTech last year;
• Just under two thirds (61%) of companies expect their spend to increase in the next 12 months;
• The No.1 barrier to driving MarTech maturity was a “Lack of governance”; and
• The top 3 areas of interest for MarTech leaders were 1) eCommerce; 2) digital experiences; and 3) then marketing analytics and attribution

As per Gartner’s research, 8 out of 10 CMOs (80%) believe that they are either entirely responsible for, or play a leading role in, their organization’s digital transformation strategy. It also found that only a third of them feel their existing tech is useful enough (33%). The race for a single view of consumers and the value of personalisation represents trillions in revenue to these businesses.

It’s not all plain sailing though. As we saw in April, worldwide privacy changes are starting to take effect after Apple rolled out updates to user tracking in iOS 14 and most customers opted to stop being followed around the internet. Google, however, delayed its deprecation of 3rd party cookies until 2023, showing that everyone needs a bit more time to prepare. 

We are seeing Australian regulators catch up with the GDPR benchmark, with new proposals for amended laws and governing powers. Big tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon were very clear in their earnings reports - privacy changes like iOS, supply chain issues like the computer chip shortage and the cost of labour like delivery drivers and warehouse staff are significant headwinds that we all should be aware of for our own businesses.

In short...

We are facing some economic uncertainty at the moment and it’s going to be hard to attract and retain tech talent in Australia for a little while. But soon this wonderful country could be known as the great Aussie dream by the best tech recruits around the world. Code during the week, camp by the ocean surrounded by kangaroos on the weekend. Maybe even get paid partially in bitcoin. Who knows, it could have the makings of the world's first MarTech stacks built on a blockchain. 

And despite our ad targeting and marketing measurement getting harder over the next 2 years, thankfully our marketing budgets are still going up. Our leaders are spending more on MarTech because it’s essential for transforming our digital commerce and our CMOs are at the heart of the journey. We are ready for these challenges and the future is very bright for all of us working in this space :)