Martech Archives | Creative Circle

In the past two years, AI innovation has swept through all facets of the marketing world, from hiring to deployment. While AI has always run in the background, now it’s become front and center, raising potential for efficiency and innovation — alongside concerns and frustrations. Employers who prioritize the intersection of human potential and technology will not only keep pace—they’ll lead.

Integrating a Human Touch in Talent Recruitment

Tech tools were supposed to make it easier and more efficient to hire best-in-class talent. And yet, both talent and employers still face frustrations over applicant tracking systems (ATS) which are used by nearly all Fortune 500 companies. LinkedIn and Reddit boards are full of stories from talent and recruiters alike, frustrated that the best talent can sometimes be overlooked, including a viral story of a manager whose own resume was rejected by the ATS, leading him to realize a code error was auto-rejecting all applicants.

Relying on applicant tracking systems alone can also open employers to vulnerabilities: AI platforms can raise bias, fairness, and equity concerns, with one hiring platform even facing a lawsuit alleging the platform’s AI-based hiring tools are discriminatory. And candidates too, can use AI tools to enhance and tailor their resumes for positions they might not be qualified for: According to one 2023 survey conducted by resume services company Standout CV, nearly three-quarters of job candidates would consider using AI tools to “embellish their resumes.”

To address these challenges, organizations should invest in hybrid recruitment models that blend AI efficiency with human oversight. This helps to ensure fairness, reduce errors, and align hiring practices with organizational values.

Having a Strong Tech POV for Maximum Results

Generative AI has significantly disrupted and impacted creative work, from ideation to execution, and the results have hit mainstream conversation. For example, an AI-made update of a classic holiday Coca-Cola commercial generated controversy, and AI integration into the popular Spotify Wrapped has also drawn mixed reactions. Ultimately, the outcome still matters, and the most successful teams in the future will likely be the ones that can integrate AI tools to boost efficiency and innovation, while using a human touch to ensure projects align with core values.

There’s also the concern over “non-authorized AI use;” Creatives who are bringing AI tools into the office without disclosure or approval, raising concerns over privacy, copyright, and more. One 2024 report published by LinkedIn and Microsoft found that 78% of workers — especially those at small and mid-size companies — are bringing their own AI tools into work, and more than half of them are reluctant to admit to using it, due to concerns that doing so might make them seem replaceable.

Employers can mitigate these risks by developing clear guidelines on how and when AI tools should be used. This not only fosters transparency but also empowers employees to leverage AI responsibly for better results.

Building a Holistic Tech-Integrated Strategy for Everyday Tasks

Tech tools can be invaluable — but it’s key that all parties feel confident using them to enhance the KPIs and goals of the department. While AI potential has only increased, new data from Slack’s Workforce Index Study has found that there has been stagnation in AI adoption, partially due to lack of training.

Marketing departments also face the problem of too much tech, not enough talent. One 2023 study found that marketers only use about one-third of their stack, partially due to a skills gap within their teams.

To bridge this divide, organizations can continue to prioritize ongoing training and bring in outside experts to maximize the stack.

Looking forward, thoughtful tech adoption can parallel alongside robust talent development. By fostering a culture of innovation and integration, employers can transform AI and tech tools into catalysts for creativity, efficiency, and growth.

Talent and Tech: The Path Forward in 2025

Our new report, Finding the Human Edge: Where Talent Meets Technology, explores key trends at the intersection of talent and technology. With more tech advancements on the horizon, it’s clear that AI and human talent are complementary. The companies who are poised to succeed will be prepared to integrate AI efficiencies alongside human innovation.

At Creative Circle, our human recruiters identify the right candidates and teams for your marketing and creative projects. By forging transformative relationships, we ensure your pain points are solved with top-tier talent, backed by deep industry expertise. From building creative teams to evolving marketing strategies and maximizing tech stacks, we help you exceed your goals and drive meaningful results.

Marketing has gone through a full tech revolution, transforming departments from creative islands into data-driven, digitally powered machines. This reliance on tech, when executed well, is a powerful force—fueling decisions, streamlining workflows, enabling precise measurement of campaign impact, and all while delivering a seamless customer experience. But in reality, even top-performing companies face challenges: duplicated efforts, inefficiencies from knowledge gaps, and ongoing frustration over how to optimize and truly streamline their tech stack so it works in concert with human teams.

The martech landscape has exploded, with over 14,000 solutions now available—representing a 27.9% growth year-over-year. According to a study by LXAHub, CMOs report an average of 56 tools in their tech stack, yet more isn’t always better. Another survey, run by Protean Studios, found that many CMOs are prioritizing simplification as they move forward, aiming to trim down and refine their stacks.

Here’s how marketing leaders can optimize their tech, empower their teams, and continue to maximize the transformative potential of AI and automation in the years ahead.

Smaller Stack, Larger Results

As martech options multiply, the paradox is clear: simplification has never been more critical. This means integrating specialized, long-tail apps into larger, core solutions like customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) systems. Often, marketing teams inherit a mishmash of niche programs, some outdated or overlapping, making it hard to streamline. Conducting a thorough audit can help CMOs and marketing leaders alike identify the essential tools and ensure best-in-class solutions are deployed effectively across the marketing funnel.

Inherited programs can also make migrations a logistical nightmare, with data transfer, integration compatibility, and team training all posing significant hurdles. A phased migration approach, backed by a clear roadmap, can ease the transition. Leveraging third-party experts can also provide valuable support, ensuring a smoother handover and minimizing disruptions to the core team’s workflow and productivity.

Making Smart Decisions to Maximize AI Potential: Building the Right Team to Handle Platform Integration

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Model (LLM) technology has changed the martech landscape, rapidly evolving how sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, and demographic segmentation, for example, operate at peak efficacy. Relying on old programs is likely ineffective, or potentially damaging to your brand. However, it can be challenging to select the right tools for your goals and leverage the power of AI to stand out from the pack.

Statistics from Salesforce show that 43% of marketers “don’t know” how to get the most value from AI, and, according to the same dataset, less than a quarter of firms have AI education and training for the marketing team. Still, nearly 50% of CMOs are piloting, or looking to pilot, initiatives surrounding AI and machine learning within the next 24 months, according to LXA Hub data.

How can marketing departments quickly and effectively deploy the best AI solutions?

One approach for successful platform integration is to look for external consultants who can fill in the knowledge gaps within your team to quickly and effectively move AI and LLM solutions from pilot to scale.

By partnering with external specialists, marketing departments can better deploy AI strategies, without waiting for headcount to open up. This flexibility allows teams to focus their budget on the most pressing concerns, ensuring resources are most effectively allocated.

Additionally, tapping into subject matter experts in this area can provide the flexibility to pivot and adapt as opportunities and needs arise, keeping your team nimble, with the capability to comfortably execute campaigns with new technology.

Building the Right Team to Maximize the Stack from Head to Tail

With AI and machine learning taking center stage in marketing strategy, tech budgets are soaring: according to LXA Hub, technology now consumes 30% of marketing spend, a jump from 24% in 2022. Yet, as marketing leaders focus on talent and acquisition, many face a skills gap in their teams.

One common issue: Often, marketing operates in isolation from IT, even though today’s tools demand a solid tech foundation and a sophisticated mastery of tech implementation. Finding talent that aligns with both the stack’s demands and the team’s overarching goals isn’t easy. A G2 survey highlights this friction, with over half of marketers citing integration issues as a roadblock to adopting new technologies.

The path forward is complex: Marketers need tech-savvy talent to fully leverage their stack’s potential, while also ensuring that their team has a balanced mix of creatives and strategists to drive innovation and effectively execute the campaigns derived from the data extrapolated by today’s next-gen tech.

Bringing in the right people can bridge this gap: from auditing current tools and training team members to crafting workflows and roadmaps, expert talent in these areas can help ensure every solution is fully utilized and aligned with long-term strategy.

A Stack Built for Evolution, Created by Top-Tier Talent

Investing in your martech stack is one of the most impactful choices marketing leaders today can make. But even the best technology can fall short without the right team to fully harness its potential.

How can you keep both your tech and team performing at peak capacity?

Finding the right balance between internal teams and outside expertise when needed is imperative to ensure that your tech investments are being effectively utilized not just for the campaigns of today, but for the campaigns of tomorrow. Additionally, having access to a broader talent pool gives your team the flexibility to efficiently allocate resources, rather than waiting for internal capacity to catch up. Moreover, outside expertise can foster an overall environment of learning and development, empowering your core team to confidently adapt and leverage solutions within your stack.

At Creative Circle, we bring the talent and expertise to not only optimize your martech stack today but also prepare it for future market shifts. Our custom, talent-driven solutions enhance your team’s potential, helping them leverage current resources for ongoing success. From consulting support to audit and enhance your stack, to building tech-savvy teams that seamlessly integrate with your current roster, we ensure your martech is precisely where it needs to be—so you can stay focused on results.

The contours of the media landscape are ever-changing. What was once ubiquitous is now far less so. By the end of 2022, 39.3 million US households cut the cord on traditional cable, a number expected to hit nearly 47 million households by the end of 2024.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that so many are saying bye (or never saying hello) to traditional cable with a plethora of streaming services like Netflix, Prime TV, Hulu, Apple TV+, Disney+, and more, which allow viewers to watch what they want, when they want, for less than the cost of a traditional cable subscription.

What is CTV?

In this rapidly shifting landscape, digital marketing is experiencing major change, with Connected TV—or CTV—emerging as a pivotal player, transforming how audiences engage with content. CTV is any television set that connects to the internet and streams digital video content through built-in smart TV functionality or external devices like streaming sticks like Roku, set-top boxes, or gaming consoles.

With this technology, viewers can access a wide range of content that goes far beyond traditional broadcast channels, like streaming services, on-demand video, and internet applications. All of this is causing major shifts in how brands advertise to their audiences, with CTV advertising in ascendancy and changing the TV advertising game. Let’s dig in.

The What and the Why of CTV Advertising

CTV advertising refers to video ads delivered through a streaming service while a viewer watches a TV show, movie, or other video content on an actual TV set via a connected device like Firestick or Roku or directly from a smart TV. For most streaming services, CTV represents over 80% of all viewing, the remainder occurring on other internet-connected devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

Unlike traditional television advertising, CTV advertising leverages viewer data like demographics, viewing habits, and interests, allowing for a more targeted and personalized ad experience. Advertisers gain improved measurement and tracking abilities, allowing for smarter and more efficient ad spending — and the ability to reach more niche audiences with greater precisions.

Evolution of TV Advertising

Traditional or linear TV advertising lets advertisers reach millions of viewers all at the same time. Linear TV advertising is what you see when you watch broadcast or cable TV — the traditional, old-school TV advertising that’s been around for decades. Linear TV ads reach everyone watching a particular program rather than just their intended audience. And measuring the success of a linear TV ad campaign is more nebulous — it’s hard to know if anyone went to go buy something after watching the ad.

With changing viewer behavior as cable and satellite TV use continue to drop, advertisers are instead following their viewers over to CTV, lured by more measurable ad performance metrics and better-optimized campaign management overall. As linear advertising spend declines, CTV ad spend is fast on the rise.

Ad spending for CTV is expected to reach $21.45 billion in 2024, an increase of 16.2% from 2023. In 2025, it is forecast to hit $24.4 billion, growing year over year by 13.9%.

CTV Advertising vs OTT Advertising

OTT means “Over-the-Top,” referring to content that goes “over” your cable box, providing access to TV content via an internet connection instead of with a cable cord or satellite. While OTT and CTV are often used interchangeably, and can refer to the same thing, it’s important to note that OTT is how video content is delivered to viewers — it can stream content across all devices, like mobile and desktop. CTV only streams content onto smart TV screens, which is why it is often referred to as streaming TV advertising.

OTT ad inventory tends to differ from CTV, which typically has premium network content similar to what you would find on traditional TV. In contrast, OTT offers a much wider range of inventory.

So, Why Use CTV ads?

If you want your ads to help you find users who actually want your products or services, CTV ads are the way to go. As streaming services like Hulu and Netflix adjust their pricing models to an ad-supported tiered system that displays more ads to folks on less expensive plans and fewer or no ads to those on higher plans, marketers can now zero in on their demographic with far more precision.

Here are a few other perks that come with CTV ads:

Multiple precision targeting methods

With linear TV, targeting is limited to finding shows that best index against ratings — the system network television uses to make programming decisions and to price advertisements. But Nielsens’ typically can only offer broad age and gender demographic metrics, like women 25 – 54 and men 18 – 49. But CTV advertisers can leverage similar digital targeting to Google and Facebook, which means audience segments can be based on everything from income or education level to personal interests and more.

Some of the top CTV targeting options to get familiar with include:

Geolocation targeting
Contextual targeting
Retargeting
Time-of-day targeting
Lookalike targeting

Hyper-local targeting

With CTV ads, it’s far easier to pinpoint consumers based on their IP address, which means ads can be hyper-localized and served to viewers in far smaller geographic areas than with linear ads. Messaging can be highly customized based on where the viewer is located. For example, a spa with four locations can send the right commercial to the right viewers closest to each location.

High Video completion rates

Superior targeting means that CTV ads are far more likely to be truly relevant to those viewing them—which means they are more likely to be interested in the ad and engage with it until completion. Using automatic content recognition technology, or ACR, CTV providers can provide real-time, second-by-second completion rate data, which helps advertisers hone the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Detailed attribution measurement and accuracy

CTV ads allow advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their brand campaigns more accurately via conversions — they can see who came to the brand’s website and completed a purchase after viewing an ad. With time and increased data, advertisers can learn what creative worked best and which publishers, dates, times, and other factors had the greatest impact on conversions.

BOTTOM LINE
Marketers, if you want to lead your company’s CTV marketing innovation charge but need help figuring out where to start, Creative Circle can provide the talent and build the teams to help you perfectly craft and precisely target your brand to shine on the TV screen. The media landscape is fast evolving — to succeed, it’s important to prime your business to be in step with the times.

Given the privacy and regulatory issues endemic to the financial services industry (FinServ), it’s taken the industry a bit of time to figure out exactly how to leverage marketing technology (Martech) to reach, retain, and inform its audiences. In line with other sectors like education and retail, FinServ is investing in Martech, and it’s paying off.

What is Martech?

Martech refers to a number of digital tools companies and entrepreneurs deploy to market their products and services to consumers and other stakeholders, from bespoke project management and design software platforms to full-fledged campaign automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This category includes some of the more well-known digital advertising platforms like Google Ads/Analytics, Microsoft Advertising, Twitter Ads, and YouTube Ads, as well as CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. All of these tools serve to streamline digital campaigns, collect and analyze data, enable automated scheduling, reporting and statistics, and produce website heat maps, schedule social media content, and more. Grouped together, these platforms are known as a Martech stack.

How pervasive has Martech become? According to online software marketplace G2, the Martech solutions marketplace has grown 27.8 percent year-over-year, increasing from just over 11,000 solutions in 2023 to more than 14,000 in 2024: this reflects both the evolving complexity of marketing requirements as well as the constant innovation in the space.

If we focus in on FinServ, recent investment activity by major industry players — like Citi, Chase, JPMorgan, and their competitors — underlines the growing importance of Martech stacks in the industry.

In March 2024, StarTree, a cloud-based real-time analytics services company powered by Apache Pinot, announced Citi had made a strategic investment in the company. Citi uses the open-source Apache Pinot and StarTree to access trade and risk monitoring for its Markets business.
In April 2024, JPMorgan Chase launched Chase Media Solutions, a new digital media business. This bank-led media platform, the first of its kind, enables advertisers to send relevant promotions to around 80 million of the bank’s customers.

Implementing Martech that’s Right on the Money

FinServ’s second-most important currency is, of course, data. Thanks to strategically built and implemented Martech stacks, FinServ companies can work with vast amounts of data to gain insight into the behaviors and preferences of their customers. By adopting a data-driven strategy, these organizations can design individualized marketing campaigns for their specific audiences and deliver them via the most effective channels at the best time. And, yes, AI is a huge contributor to the data-driven results and effectiveness of FinServ Martech stacks, given its ability to analyze and process massive amounts of customer data — effectively democratizing the use of marketing technology.

Implementing Martech that’s right on the money can transform your marketing efforts to produce tangible results, but it’s important to follow the right steps. Similar to the healthcare industry, FinServ is under strict regulations and requirements when it comes to marketing, largely for the protection of investors. There are several laws governing FinServ outreach to consumers, including the Truth in Advertising Act, the Truth in Savings Act and Fair Lending Laws, among others. In December of 2020, the SEC finalized reforms under the Investment Advisers Act to modernize rules governing advertising and marketing by investment firms. Although these rules remain in place today, FinServ organizations are expected to keep up with any changes in the regulatory landscape.

FinServ companies need to invest in the right Martech strategy to be able to follow these laws while still executing marketing campaigns that perform, simultaneously maintaining a seamless ecosystem of interconnected digital marketing tools via strategic integrations to help increase adoption and effective usage. To truly optimize a Martech stack and maximize ROI, these companies need the right roadmap, and the right talent, to get them there. But what is a Martech roadmap, particularly in the FinServ space?

The Martech Roadmap: Your Path to Success

According to Gartner, a Martech roadmap helps CMOs, Marketing Operations Directors, VPs of Strategy and Innovation – and other marketing executives – communicate current and future Martech capabilities to their teams and/or throughout an enterprise. These executives can leverage their roadmaps to plan, compile business and user needs for use-case development, review and acquire new technologies, build fresh capabilities, and predict and adapt to evolving technology, potential risks, and other marketplace disruptions.

What’s the best way to start building a roadmap and begin leveraging everything a Martech stack can do for your FinServ company? You need the right people to help you put the right stack together, experts with real depth in marketing and technology who can provide your organization with the solutions it needs, such as:

Platform assessment and implementation
Business setups for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) builds
Workfront-to-Workfront project management configuration
Integration of Workfront with Adobe Creative Cloud
Impeccable, on-brand, user-friendly dashboards
Salesforce operations, program, and project management, and administration
And so much more…

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Bottomline

Martech strategy is, simply put, one of the most important investments a FinServ company — or any organization for that matter — can make. Thinking about putting together a Martech stack that drives measurable ROI and turns your FinServ organization into a formidable competitor? Need a team to activate, maintain, and/or evolve it? One that understands the myriad compliance issues innate to the financial services industry from investment banking and trading services to wealth management and beyond?

At Creative Circle, we have the talent and expertise you need to effectively leverage Martech and stay at its ever-evolving vanguard. We develop tailor-made, talent-driven solutions that meet your organization where it’s at today, and we can build out teams to prepare your brand for tomorrow. In other words, we’ve got Martech expertise and consulting-level support that you can bank on.