What do James Bond and marketing technology have in common? According to Murat Demiral’s keynote at our recent Insurindex Marketing Summit, a great deal. Drawing a fascinating parallel between James Bond, and the supporting MI6 team (including the iconic DB5!) that made his missions possible, and the B2B marketing world, Murat argued that no AI agent, however flashy or powerful, is ultimately effective without the right infrastructure behind it.
AI and automation maybe rewriting the rules for marketing, but too often the basics are being overlooked with unstructured data, un-referenced KPIs, and unclear processes forming the key inputs. One business, that Murat had worked with, had over 350 marketing KPIs but barely used 10% of them. Before racing ahead into using flashy and exciting AI tools, get the structure in place, clean your data, align your KPIs, and understand and simplify the workflow.
It is only then that true productisation can happen, not in terms of what is sold to your customers, but rather in terms of data products created to automate and speed up internal processes. If these are built on the right foundation it will enable efficiency gains, faster processes and time freed up for important things such as innovation and customer engagement.
From legal teams analysing patents to marketers automating the building of campaigns, the right internal data products free up time, reduce waste, and improve performance. But this cannot be at the expense of expertise. AI does not replace experience; rather experience is absolutely necessary to train models, interpret customer touchpoints and ask the right questions.
The real opportunity for marketing leaders is to turn efficiency gains into competitive advantages. This is not about end-to-end automation or hyped-up dashboards. It is about using the tools available now to build smarter systems, free up talent, and unlock the insight already sitting in your organisation.
As Murat concluded, marketing is becoming more cost-effective, but only if we stop chasing the next thing and fix the foundations first. In other words, if there is no Aston Martin, there is no mission. No structure, no success.