Four months ago, I started a collaboration with Jason Baldwin, the global head of product management at WPP, to write a paper on the major trends in marketing technology that we believe will shape the decade ahead for agencies and brands.

It wasn’t about guessing our own “hype cycle” of individual technologies. There are plenty of those predictions out there, and I’ve never found them particularly helpful for executives trying to shape their long-term strategies and capabilities development.

Instead, we stepped back to consider the second-order effects that so many of these different technological innovations are feeding — broad patterns of how marketing organizations are changing in a digital world. Of the five trends we researched, all of them are already emerging in practice. You can and should harness them today.

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