MarTech Interview with Darren Guarnaccia, President at Uniform

Darren Guarnaccia, President at Uniform chats about the evolution of CMS technologies and what marketers should keep in mind when adopting similar tools to power their digital experiences:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Darren, tell us about your journey over the years and your biggest B2B tech marketing moments…we’d love to hear more about your role as President at Uniform…

I got into Marketing Technology about 25 years ago, back when the internet was shiny and new. I remember being enthralled with new digital commerce technology back then, and got my start implementing e-business solutions (we put an E in front of everything back then) like ATG and Blue Martini, and eventually started working with web content management vendors. Those of course morphed into digital experience platforms (DXP). One of my greatest B2B tech marketing moments was helping Sitecore lead the shift in the market from commoditized WCM technology to the new DXP market. Now, almost a decade and a half later, we’re seeing the market evolve yet again into digital experience composition platforms (DXCP).

I joined Uniform last year because I see the digital experience world shifting yet again to composable, easily assembled technology that helps brands move faster than ever before. At Uniform, I lead our marketing, product strategy, and enablement teams to help customers realize the potential of composable digital experiences.

How have you seen the CMS segment evolve over the years and what are some of the predictions you have in mind for the near future of this space?

The CMS segment has evolved along two axes. What started as a solution for managing web pages has broadened to support many channels beyond just the web. It’s incorporated customer data as well to help improve experiences across those channels and optimize marketing performance. The second axis has been the pendulum shift between marketing usability vs developer usability.

Early CMS technologies were very developer-centric. The rise of DXPs swung the pendulum to the marketer or merchandiser, and now headless technologies have pulled the pendulum back to the developer again. I predict we’ll see evolution across both of these axes. The number of channels supported will explode, and the form factors are about to change dramatically.

Generative AI has signaled a step change in how we engage with information, and content is about to explode off the page, literally. I predict we’ll see broad adoption of the augmented reality(AR) form factor (phones, glasses, etc). ChatGPT and their clones are another channel we’ll need to provide for, and content and experiences will soon be federated further and further from the brand’s control.

The need to be able to package and distribute content has never been more important. At the same time, I predict a new era of digital experiences being built from composable elements that are built by fusion teams of marketers and developers working closely together. The pendulum will finally come to rest in the center, where marketers, designers, and developers work together closely to deliver compelling experiences faster with the tools that support each team well.

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For brands considering a new CMS platform, what top thoughts / tips would you share with them?

Given how much change we’re facing, I would suggest brands optimize for speed and flexibility. Brands are starting to eschew large, bloated all-in-one platforms and opting for faster, more nimble platforms that can be built incrementally and assembled as needed. The name of the game will be faster time to learning, to help support speed to iteration and innovation. The brands that out-learn and out-iterate their competition will be the winners of the next decade.

For first time adopters or early adopters of these systems, what are some challenges that brand usually run into when starting out?

As brands start to assemble their own digital experience stacks, it’s important to maintain that flexibility in your implementations. Keeping systems loosely coupled and night hard-coded together will protect your optionality in the future, and keep you from getting stuck in glue-code. Glue-code is the integration code you write to stitch multiple systems together, but it can be a trap that paints you into a corner and limits your speed and agility. Architecting for flexibility and speed is an important design principle you need to be intentional about protecting.

As the CMS market grows: what types of features/capabilities will come to the forefront and become more integral to overall tech stacks?

As marketers, designers, and developers start working together more closely, we’ll see innovation that helps them work better together, and in faster ways. This will include workflow and automation that helps them all work together in parallel, and reduce dependencies between each team, while still supporting collaboration. We’ll also see more capabilities around visualizing and previewing new form factors like AR, ways to optimize for generative AI, and ways to federate experiences to the edge, where customers are operating off the property.

A few common misconceptions about the modern state of marketing and martech you’d like to dispel before we wrap up?

A lot of conversation has been happening around generative AI, and how it will destroy marketing jobs. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I do think it will democratize a lot of what happens in marketing, and what a single persona can do. What it will really do is drive compression in time from ideation to execution, and will likely further increase customer expectations of brands. This will have the unintended consequence of requiring brands to raise their game of content and experiences, which now is possible with the likes of ChatGPT. Thus, marketers will be under more pressure to deliver more as these expectations rise.

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