Jayne Pimentel, senior director of growth marketing for DraftKings, spoke on the panel "The Future of Data-Driven Marketing” at CES 2020, held January 7-10 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. She shared her insights with eMarketer about the digital landscape heading into 2020.
As you think back on your expectations for CES 2020, what were the biggest surprises for you?
I’m surprised with how much of an echo chamber our industry has become when listening across panels featuring opinions from agencies, vendors and in-house. It feels as though everyone is agreeing with each other and no one is addressing the elephants in the room for each industry.
The agency model is outdated and threatened yet barely anyone touched upon how they’re taking a hard look at restructuring to fit the needs of the current marketer.
Vendors weren’t getting out of pitch mode to ask more questions about what the market wants rather than pitch-point solutions.
Another thing not addressed was how hard it is to bring things in-house, what infrastructure is needed and where we’ve failed in the past few years. This is becoming more of a trend and it’s critical to talk about.
What are your predictions for the most important trends of 2020?
Creative innovation is coming back into focus. While in the last years the focus was on targeting, marketers are remembering that without decent creatives your targeting is meaningless. It’s also one of the last things the walled gardens have yet to take away from the marketers as a lever to pull to optimize.
What were the most talk-about trends at CES?
In most of my one-on-one meetings, I was very impressed and excited to hear about the focus on refining in-housing. In years past, it was just about rushing and taking media buying, strategy, etc. in-house. But now marketers were talking in more measured, systematic approaches.
I think we’ll see better offerings from vendors with products to support in-housing. We’ll likely see this from the agency side too with in-housing initiatives for their clients in a consultancy capacity.
As always, I heard a lot of about data. But I also heard more about creative than in years past. Creative innovation is great to see and I hope to see a lot of it in 2020!
CES 2020 was packed with keynotes, events, announcements and products. Which will have the most lasting impact?
Parties are overrated and it tends to draw the same people. I don’t dig the parties as much as I dig the one-on-one time with people that I don’t get face time with often.
I also enjoyed the second circle network I get introduced to. It’s great to meet the experts of various fields that are not always at the industry events I go to.
If you could pick one thing that should stay in Vegas, forever, what would it be?
Spirited socks. We’re adults. Dress up. Don’t wear crazy socks and think that checks the box.
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