Trends such as first-party data collection and AI put reliance on IT teams; marketers want IT accountable for ROI

Lytics, a leading customer data platform (CDP), announces the findings of its report, Marketing and IT: The strategic partnership, a survey of over 200 senior marketers and IT decision makers. The survey finds that 81% of marketers believe that IT teams will become increasingly involved in marketing efforts over the next five years. With that role comes an expectation from both teams on accountability for marketing ROI: 96% of marketers and 89% of IT leaders said that IT teams should have more accountability for marketing ROI.

A confluence of trends, such as the degradation of the third-party cookie, and the rise of first-party data collection, have necessitated a union between the two teams. Today, marketers use first-party data from a number of different sources including: their website, mobile app, CRM, ecommerce platform, and point-of-sale (POS) to inform all of their segmentation and targeting. To gain insights from the data—which is typically housed in the data warehouse and mostly inaccessible to marketers—marketers must rely on their IT team. 75% of the marketers surveyed said that IT teams are responsible for giving them access to data for their operations and nearly 70% of marketers said they rely on IT teams for data modeling.

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“Marketing continues to become more data-centric because it is the foundation for nearly everything that they’ll do in the future,” said Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, President, Lytics. “With data at the center of every organization, marketing and technology teams need to work more closely to both utilize data and, more importantly, to safeguard it for the benefit of their customers and to comply with increasing governmental regulations.”

As marketing becomes more tech-enabled, IT teams are also playing an increased role in choosing technology vendors and products for marketing. 76% of IT teams surveyed said that they help to choose technology and SaaS vendors for marketers. Marketers said that customer data platforms (73%) and artificial intelligence (66%) top their lists for procurement followed by blockchain and smart contracts (53%). Surprisingly fewer than 40% of marketers plan to adopt Unified ID (UID) technology. IT is even less bullish on UID, with just 22% of IT decision makers planning to implement it within the next five years.

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Even though 66% of marketing leaders (and 67% of IT leaders) plan to integrate AI into the marketing stack, many are still unsure as to what role it will play in marketing. One priority is targeting. Most marketers, 64%, said that AI will take on the majority of the heavy lifting in the future of ad targeting. Marketers rank the automation of marketing tasks as the main benefit of AI, followed by making their ad spend more efficient (40%). Just 35% of marketers intend to use AI to inform advertising creative.

The value of data in marketing relies on accessibility,” added Kaykas-Wolff. “Given that nearly 75% of marketers plan to invest in a CDP in the next two years, and nearly 60% hiring data analysts, it’s clear that marketers want ready-access and will make moves to get there.”