Back in 2006, Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi founded Marketo. At the time, they only had a PowerPoint. But then again, they also had a compelling vision to create a new category known as marketing automation. Within a few years, Marketo would become one of the fastest software companies in the world, as the market-product fit was near perfect. By 2013, the company went public and then a few years later, it would go private. Then as of 2018, Marketo agreed to sell to Adobe for $4.75 billion.

The marketing world is evolving at warp speed thanks to advances in technologies such as machine learning. Peter Day looks at key trends that have brought us to where we are and those that will dictate the future. If the last five years have demonstrated anything, it's the awesome power and opportunity that can be unleashed by data when it's properly understood – and the problems that can arise when it's not. Those divergent possible outcomes are increasingly a reality for every organisation as they grapple with the once incomprehensible mountains of information that they possess. With the emergence and increasing availability of technologies such as machine learning, those mountains of data are looking ever more conquerable and more easily navigated.

Back in 2006, Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi founded Marketo. At the time, they only had a PowerPoint. But then again, they also had a compelling vision to create a new category known as marketing automation. Within a few years, Marketo would become one of the fastest software companies in the world, as the market-product fit was near perfect. By 2013, the company went public and then a few years later, it would go private. Then as of 2018, Marketo agreed to sell to Adobe for $4.75 billion.

Amplero - Knowing your customer allows you to personalize your messaging. However, understanding customers at the individual level takes more than just a focus group or a survey. Amplero helps modern marketers automatically optimize every customer interaction with its digital intelligence platform through machine learning. The result is increased lift across key customer metrics such as ARPU, Retention, and CLV-- beyond what's humanly possible. Follow Analytics - A key aspect of the mobile mind-shift is the focus on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and place. Follow Analytics makes it easy to achieve this with comprehensive analytics that help mobile businesses automatically achieve one-on-one engagement with customers.

It's the Law of Accelerating Returns: When tech pundits try to predict the future, they always underestimate. The scientific reasoning: The more advanced a technology is, the faster it can progress -- precisely because it's more advanced. Just take a look at not only the progress of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but its proliferation of use cases, which is moving inevitably into the marketing realm. And this is the kind of growth explosion you want to be at the forefront of. It's why here at the tail end of 2016, we've watched over 200 AI-focused companies raise nearly $1.5 billion in funding, and have seen a 6X increase in equity deals to AI startups from 70ish in 2011 to almost 400 in 2015.