At LiveRamp, one of our biggest and most anticipated events of the year is RampUp. RampUp 2019 marks our seventh year and we’re proud that it has become the premier conference for leaders in martech, and we challenge ourselves each year to make the conference even better for speakers and attendees alike.
As we reflect on an action-packed week, here’s a roundup of RampUp 2019 conference highlights:
Be just as obsessed with your customers as you are with data
In her opening keynote discussion with our CEO Scott Howe, Marketo’s CMO Sarah Kennedy Ellis emphasized the importance of transparency in communication and that the customer experience is “the future of everything.” She reflected on how Marketo is able to deliver a consistently personalized message through its latest partnership with LiveRamp in a privacy-first manner.
To kick off Day 2 of RampUp 2019, LiveRamp’s President and Head of Products and Platforms, Anneka Gupta, also encouraged attendees to be obsessed with their customers in order to stand out and develop genuine, long-standing relationships.
Customer obsession goes hand-in-hand with data obsession: getting in-depth with data helps us engage with purpose. Cars.com’s Brooke Skinner Ricketts discussed how data infatuation drives her and her team to let the data guide where she spends her media buying dollars to make the most impact. She also encouraged attendees to hire those with that same curiosity to have them truly invested.
In the closing keynote, Oakland A’s Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, Billy Beane, discussed how data and statistics charted a new path not only for the A’s, but also for the baseball industry itself in how the business side of the sport spends money. As the subject of the best-selling book and film Moneyball, Beane recalled how the industry was making judgments based on the romance of the game, when it was such a data-rich industry with “160 years of stats that no one was using.” He turned around the Oakland A’s, and to an extent the sport itself, noting, “We’re making decisions based on information. We’re not making decisions based on gut.”
The power of identity goes beyond ad campaigns
With over three dozen sessions in two days, we heard many thought-provoking conversations on the future of adtech and martech. We also heard from brands, agencies, and platforms from a variety of fields and growth stages as to how they reacted to new technologies and industry policy changes, and leveraged martech solutions to engage with purpose. Here are some other notable quotes:
In the RampUp 2019 preconference session titled A View of the Madtech Ecosystem, Winterberry Group’s Managing Director Jonathan Margulies shared that when it comes to leveraging identity, the smartest marketers are focusing on the business benefits of adopting identity beyond advertising:
During the Achieving Omnichannel Harmony session, Barclay’s Vice President of Digital Acquisition, Aparna Menon, advised attendees that there are both marketing-level considerations and business-level shifts at the start of the omnichannel journey that need to be discussed:
When thinking about B2B marketing and analyzing the data for campaigns, Dun & Bradstreet’s Senior Vice President, Anudit Vikram, reminded us during the The Other ABM: Account-Based Measurement session that comparing B2B and B2C is like comparing apples to oranges:
Come for the martech and adtech insights, stay for the RampPups!
We were so excited to bring back the RampPups, sponsored by Inscape — and so was Index Exchange’s Mike O’ Sullivan. While it was raining cats and dogs in the Rooftop Garden, that didn’t deter the puppies from the San Francisco SPCA from receiving all the cuddles and playtime indoors.
RampUp 2019 may have wrapped up, but we’ll have recordings from the sessions posted on RampedUp.us in the coming weeks. Also, keep an eye out for our Spring road show, where we’ll be packing up our adtech and martech tools and heading to a city near you!