What I learned in Silicon Valley about the near future of marketing

One of the fascinating parts of my job (at least to me!) is that I get to meet with and talk to people from some of the world’s biggest and most successful tech firms.

They can be clients, or prospects, or people I run into at conferences and trade shows. And my conversations with them help me create a mental map of what’s happening in marketing and where martech is heading.

Conversations I had during a recent trip to Silicon Valley made a big impression on me. That’s because everyone I talked to seemed aligned on two important points. I want to share my impressions because I think they are critically important for anyone in the industry right now.

1. Silicon Valley is preparing for explosive growth next year

Everywhere I went in Silicon Valley this year, the story was the same. Companies are expecting serious growth in 2025.

As a result, they are putting a lot of effort right now into getting themselves ready to take advantage of that growth.

Some of the people I talked to work for successful companies already on a growth trajectory; others are with firms whose performance lately has been less than stellar.

But they all told me the same thing, which went something like this:

“We’re going to really grow next year! This is a big opportunity for us. So we really need to build for scale.”

In anticipation of this growth, all the companies I met with are re-evaluating their approach to just about everything.

That often means ripping out existing systems, technologies and processes and replacing them with new systems, technologies and processes that are deemed to be more efficient and better able to scale in a ‘growth, growth, growth’ scenario.

For example, one company is shifting its entire marketing technology stack to a completely different system; another is preparing to rewrite the playbook for its entire marketing team; yet another is doing a big exercise across all marketing channels to try to figure out what it takes to do successful marketing today.

The question they are all asking themselves is:

“How are we going to do X, Y or Z when we are 10 times bigger than we are today?”

As one person told me,

We don’t know what we don’t know. But when I look at my processes and how we get things built, I see a lot of opportunities for efficiency in the name of growth. So we need to be rethinking everything to make sure we are as streamlined as we can be.

2. No one is letting the past get in the way of the future

The second take-away from my trip to Silicon Valley is that no one there is hung up on the current way of doing things. Everyone is open to jettisoning existing systems, technologies and processes and replacing them with something completely new.

That openness is critical: It’s allowing the companies to turn on a dime, jump onto the latest trends and adopt the most effective efficiencies.

Silicon Valley has always been a fast-paced place. But it seems to me they are looking for ways to go even faster now.

People weren’t saying, “Here’s how we do things today and here’s how we want to transition.”

Instead, they were saying:

“We’re ready to dump what we’ve been doing and take a whole new approach.”

I suspect that the arrival of artificial intelligence is behind the shift in attitude.

Any company involved in AI – and everyone is – can’t be bound by legacy systems. It’s got to be all about the future – a future that is full of uncharted territory and ripe with the promise of growth.

So what they are saying is:

“We want to change to be whatever we need to be to continue to scale.”

That means decisions are being made quickly, and changes are being implemented with lightning speed, because they want to be ready to ride the growth wave.

As one of my contacts told me:

We’re looking at all of our processes now. I don’t care what they look like, or who created them. We are looking at everything in a completely unbiased way. I am not tied to any way of doing things, past or present, if it’s slowing us down. I want to see how we can get rid of anything that keeps us from moving faster.

Even things that have been sensitive in the past – like work assigned to outside agencies – is on the table. “I don’t care” whether you use the agency or not, whatever is best for the company, one person told me.

Getting ready for 2025

Silicon Valley is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to the future.

Because they are driving technological change, and because technology is so critical to today’s economy, Silicon Valley sets the tone for the entire market.

That’s probably why I was so impressed by what I saw and heard during my recent trip.

Silicon Valley is extremely optimistic about 2025; they are anticipating explosive growth.

Marketers need to be aware of this. And they also need to get ready to ride the wave. Just like the people in Silicon Valley, they need to be doing things right now to clear the way for growth and scaling in 2025.