Forrester

If you’re looking to implement a new program or fine-tune your existing brand measurement, we have both bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that, compared with most financial, transactional, and operational metrics, brand is notoriously difficult to pin down and hence eludes easy measurement. The good news is that because of the lack of standardization, many measurement providers have crafted unique and creative analytical frameworks to help companies measure and manage brands. If you’re looking for some help with brand measurement, we’ve short-listed the best measurement providers in our new report for Forrester clients, The Brand Measurement Consulting Services Landscape, Q4 2024. Here are some things to keep in mind as you embark on that journey. Know your mind. When you are ready to start, ask yourself two questions: 1) What do you want to get out of brand measurement and 2) what are you willing to put into it? For example, if you just want to track the standard brand purchase funnel with a modest budget, then the solution you seek is likely different from that of a company looking to reset its brand strategy because it is rapidly losing relevance and share in its category. Clear expectations about your objectives and a realistic knowledge of your resource constraints will help sharpen your search for a partner. Do your homework. Your measurement partner likely has vast experience in several categories working for many brands. But let’s be very clear — no one knows your business like you do. If you’re in the market for a provider (with a formal RFP or general inquiry), go in with a fairly detailed spec of what you want done. This could include a well-defined understanding of audiences, geographies, brand and product portfolios, competitive and North Star brands you want to test, and hypotheses about key strategic initiatives and growth plans. A good partner will help you shape and refine this thinking, but diligent homework on your part will make the final result that much better. Kick the tires. When you pick a partner, you make a serious commitment; you want to go on a few dates before you tie the knot. Have conversations not just with account managers but with the subject-matter experts who will lead your work to gauge your comfort level with their expertise. Let them react to your homework to see if they can push your thinking. Give them what you consider to be the hardest challenge in measuring your brand (maybe low awareness, obscure segments, or confusing branding) and see how they propose to address it. Ask for specific output from other client engagements (anonymized is OK) that they expect to replicate for yours. Thoroughly test out dashboards and tools rather than passively demo them. Need help putting all this together? Please talk to your account team about my workshop on brand measurement that covers understanding what to measure, how, and who to do it with. To stay connected to brand, marketing, and growth strategy topics, go to my Forrester bio and choose “Follow.” If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing these topics, please schedule time with me. source

Data ingestion into security information and event management (SIEM) is too expensive. In fact, it’s so expensive that “How do we reduce our SIEM ingest costs?” is one of the top inquiry questions I get from Forrester clients. And the problem is not new — security leaders have struggled with managing their SIEM budget for over a decade. Visibility without actionability is an expensive waste of time. The increasing spend in SIEM is driven by a few factors. First, the shift to the cloud produced more data to intake and store. To scale at the rate of ingest, SIEM vendors moved their offerings to the cloud — a shift that necessitated ingest-based pricing to balance out cost. But most importantly, the crux of SIEM cost challenges stems from the belief that more data in the SIEM is better. Security is a big data problem, right? More data, more visibility, more insights … right? Not quite. Data — and subsequent visibility into that data — is meaningless without actionability. Data is brought into the SIEM for compliance requirements and for alerting on potential attacker activity. To alert on attacker activity, a human being needs to build a rule. Visibility into the data is only half the battle. You could have all the visibility in the world, but without those rules, you will not find the attackers consistently and in a more automated way. Instead, we recommend focusing what you ingest on what’s most important for compliance and alerting. But it isn’t always easy to do so because: Logs have extra fields that you don’t always need. The structure changes and is different between vendors. You want some logs to go to a certain datastore with others elsewhere. You may want to redact data for privacy reasons. Further, indexed data can often become 3–5x the original size. SIEM vendors have the ability to address some of these challenges, but the capabilities tend to be limited and cumbersome to use. The vendors haven’t created effective tools for log size reduction or routing especially, since it directly opposes their own interests: getting you to ingest more data into their platform and, therefore, spend more money with them. Data pipeline management tools reduce data preparation. This is where data pipeline management (DPM) tools for security come in. DPM tools can route, reduce, redact, enrich, or transform data. The benefits of a purpose-built data pipeline tool are to reduce the data preparation necessary to interpret the streams of data and events specific to security insights. With increasingly distributed and disparate systems, a purpose-built data pipeline tool is designed to address complexity of classification, integration, and modeling data for analysis. Security teams get immediate value from its ability to reduce log sizes and thus ingest costs. In the longer term, however, much of the value comes from storage tiering or data routing — being able to redirect data to the storage location of your choice. For example, short-term data valuable for incident response can be routed directly to extended detection and response (XDR), while data for compliance requirements can be directed to longer-term, cheaper storage. This can be useful across the business, especially for those that have data storage requirements for different use cases such as compliance, detection and response, or IT. When it comes to DPM tools for security, Cribl is one of the earliest to market and the most ubiquitous, but others such as Tenzir, Tarsal, DataBahn, Calyptia, observIQ, and Observe are also built to manage data pipelines for security use cases. Some SIEM and XDR vendors are also building more robust data pipeline management capabilities, like Splunk’s Data Management Pipeline Builders and CrowdStrike’s CrowdStream (CrowdStream leverages Cribl). Generic DPM tools lack security-specific context. Data pipeline management tools are not new; your enterprise likely uses them already, especially on the data team, but they are likely not specific to the security use case, which makes them more cumbersome for the security team to retrofit to support the security use case. For example, it will become more difficult to transform data to align to a standard like OCSF (Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework), since generic tools will not support the framework. The tools may also lack the integrations into security tools you need. With that said, in upcoming reports, Forrester will be releasing research on data use case crossover and consolidation. In December, I’ll be speaking on security data management strategies at Forrester’s Security & Risk Summit in Baltimore, Maryland. Come join us and get your questions answered! In the meantime, if you have any questions about data pipeline management for security and IT, request an inquiry or guidance session with me or one of my colleagues. source

Product Model And Enterprise Business Management Lead The Conversation with Tracy Woo This year, I had the pleasure of attending three standout conferences: first, Atlassian’s Team ’24 and ServiceNow’s Knowledge ’24, and last week, the TBM Conference in San Diego (with a co-branded CloudyCon for FinOps). Each had its highlights, but the TBM Council Conference really brought together product centricity and transparency in the modern IT operating model. The discussions were rich with insights, and the networking opportunities were invaluable. The Shift To Product Centricity Product centricity is no longer a buzzword — it’s here to stay. Keynotes from Mastercard and BNY Mellon underscored this shift. Both organizations are fully embracing product-centric approaches, moving away from the traditional waterfall investment styles to more steady-state, value stream-based funding. This move isn’t just a leading-edge trend; in many large orgs, it’s a done deal. They’ve already gone through their first iteration of product-centric transformation and are now fine-tuning their approaches. This shift is not just about changing funding models but also about fundamentally rethinking how IT delivers value to the business. Mastercard, for example, has made significant strides in showing the total cost of ownership by product. It compared its product-centric transformation to an “HGTV renovation” — tearing out the old operating model down to the studs and completely rebuilding. The idea is to give products more autonomy, treating them as businesses within the business (this phrase was uttered several times at various sessions). This shift requires capabilities for chargeback or at least showback, holding teams accountable for their financial performance and creating a culture where IT products are managed with the same rigor and accountability as any other business unit. Service costing and pricing by product are becoming increasingly important. Organizations need to manage capacity and utilization effectively, and this requires a clear understanding of service costs. I was in one breakfast discussion that drilled into the problem of unused capacity and how to charge for it; it’s a perennial problem in IT finance and has similarities to the notorious “death spiral” problem in public utilities. The move to product centricity also brings a new level of accountability. Agile teams may be awarded the autonomy they crave, but be careful what you wish for. In Spider-Man’s words, “With great power comes great responsibility.”* Product teams must make their numbers and justify their costs, and large orgs are turning to TBM implementations to realize this. Enterprise Business Management   A new (to me, anyways) acronym was making the rounds at the conference: enterprise business management, or EBM. For those of you who have followed Forrester’s research on enterprise service management (ESM) and how it emerged from IT service management, this is exactly analogous. When the initial IT help desks with their service catalogs were established, other business units would use them and say “Cool! Why not my area?” So facilities, HR, marketing, legal, and many other areas started leveraging what had initially been IT-centric workflows. (This is a major reason for ServiceNow’s success and continued expansion into non-IT domains, which many still find puzzling.) Now we see a similar dynamic with IT finance, and just like with ESM, facilities in many cases is the next one to the party. If history repeats, we’ll also see HR, legal, corporate communications, and others developing cost models for their services — in other words, the increasing application of tools and techniques first developed for IT financial management (ITFM) to non-IT accounting and finance problems. Why would an organization do this, you ask? Because so-called “technology business management” and the related practices of IT finance are not — repeat, not — tightly coupled to technology itself. What? An IT finance tool represents a general capability to create better business-aligned visibility across the low-level facts of the general ledger. Actual costs such as people, software, hardware, and services are rolled up into higher-order cost pools, which can then be defined as services with cost drivers (e.g., headcount) and then consumed by business units in pursuit of their outcomes. Did I say much about technology there? Hardware and software are just a couple of expense categories. Who cares if they are “technical”? Other business operations might desire to do much the same thing with their base costs. TBM thought leaders tell me that when TBM is implemented and the CFO grasps the implications, they start to think about other applications of the same techniques to other operational units, especially cost centers. They are also useful in environments sensitive to overhead and allocated costs (e.g., grant-funded). My prediction: The enterprise service management vendors will increasingly grasp the opportunity here and either develop their own approaches or partner more strongly with established TBM/ITFM vendors. Architecting And Governing IT Management Data State Farm’s breakout session covered its project-to-product work, as well; I was also glad when they drilled into the importance of IT management data hygiene. Maintaining accurate data is crucial, whether for operational purposes or transparency in IT costs. This session highlighted the challenges of maintaining clean data and the importance of getting buy-in from all stakeholders, even when the data isn’t perfect. Enterprise architecture received multiple callouts across sessions as a key capability assisting in reducing sprawl and providing key insights into large IT portfolios. There were many mentions that the configuration management database (CMDB) is essential for IT finance, despite ongoing industry skepticism and struggles. CMDBs continue to fail when they are implemented by engineers or IT service management practitioners without data chops. It’s not just about ITIL or turning up an auto-discovery feed to “11,” a la “Spinal Tap”; data architecture and governance are crucial. Success comes when you realize that you are faced with a large-scale, complex database that needs to be managed by data professionals using well-understood principles like data quality management. FinOps The relationship between FinOps and IT financial management was a hot topic at the TBM Council Conference. FinOps, which focuses on managing cloud costs and ensuring that cloud spending aligns with business value, is currently more

Why Now? Why An API Security Landscape? For years, different departments within organizations have passed the responsibility of API security from one to another while companies reaped the benefits of the API economy. Unfortunately, with inadequate protection and security, cybercriminals have also been capitalizing on this growth. Existing tools have often fallen short — either not going far enough in their protection or simply not being purpose-built for APIs. While API discovery and policy enforcement have gained traction, it’s time for companies to elevate their approach to API security maturity. Simply put, it’s the right moment for businesses to build an API security landscape that addresses the modern challenges head on. So What Do We Mean By API Security? Forrester defines API security software as: Software that discovers and analyzes API traffic and endpoints and implements security policies and controls to protect APIs from unauthorized access and abuse. The market is evolving rapidly, and new opportunities are emerging. But the question remains: Where should professionals begin? The Shifting Landscape Of API Security In 2024 As enterprises rapidly embrace microservices, the role of API security in safeguarding digital ecosystems becomes critical. APIs, the essential building blocks that enable interconnected systems, have seen unprecedented growth, bringing both opportunities and vulnerabilities. Forrester’s recent Q3 2024 report on the API security software landscape provides essential insights into the vendors, challenges, and emerging trends in this space. The Growing API Landscape: A Double-Edged Sword APIs have transformed how organizations innovate, modernize their infrastructure, and connect with customers and partners. As API usage has skyrocketed, however, so too has the attack surface. Many organizations possess more APIs than they realize and, being purpose-built for sensitive data exchange and critical business logic, they are an ideal target for cybercriminals using sophisticated techniques such as API parameter manipulation, injection attacks, and access token spoofing. According to Forrester’s research, API security software is no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity. The API Security Vendor Landscape: Fragmentation And Consolidation Forrester’s report on the API security software market identifies a diverse set of vendors, each offering different capabilities tailored to specific business needs, but this market remains highly fragmented. The API security market has seen notable consolidation in recent years. This trend toward consolidation aims to integrate API security as a core component within broader application security and web application firewall platforms. At the same time, smaller, specialized vendors continue to innovate by offering dedicated solutions for API discovery, protection, and threat detection, and specialized API security startups are jumping into niche fields. API Security Challenges: Misconceptions And Gaps One of the most significant issues facing security teams today is the widespread misunderstanding of what constitutes effective API security. Many organizations equate API discovery and traffic monitoring tools with comprehensive API security, leading to a false sense of confidence. While these tools are essential, they only address part of the problem. Forrester’s recent report, The API Security Software Landscape, Q3 2024, provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the market and offers valuable insights for security leaders navigating this complex landscape. And yes, the eight components of API security are leading in this evaluation toward creating a comprehensive API security strategy. By selecting the right API security vendors and adopting forward-thinking security practices, security leaders can ensure that their organizations are well equipped to face the challenges of the API-driven future. source

The increased availability of digital-first experiences has encouraged consumers to take control of their healthcare journey. Today, 44% of consumers indicate that in the last 12 months, they started using a wearable, smart devices, and/or medical devices to support their overall health. Most consumers prefer to do health-related activities, such as refilling a prescription, finding a doctor, or checking their symptom, by using a web browser or an app. In response, healthcare organizations (HCOs) must use continuous digital-first strategies and customer experience platforms that build sustained engagement. HCOs need to design experiences that are dynamic and evolve with customers’ changing priorities and preferences. HCOs must also support customers with clear language, empathy, transparency, and ease. HCOs: Prepare To Give Consumers Control Healthcare delivery and services are full of roadblocks. HCOs often fail to deliver promises to consumers, such as granting more control of their data and protecting their personal information from cyberattacks. Opaque experiences and complex jargon have eroded consumer confidence and incentivized some to leave brands behind. Consumers will choose HCOs that emphasize their needs and that increasingly gather and rely on their feedback to deliver value. The integration of next-gen technologies, below-the-glass experiences, and customer obsession is already laying the foundation for advances in personalized medicine and increased access to health information. As consumer experiences in healthcare rapidly transform, HCOs need to create effective experiences that foster lasting loyalty by: Easing consumer experiences by using generative AI to upskill employees. Automatically summarizing a medical record for employees relieves consumers of the burden of repetitive questions about their past medical history and social determinants of health needs. It also frees employees’ time for other, more productive tasks. Bolstering security and protecting data privacy. HCOs are increasingly susceptible to cyberattacks and data breaches due to technology concentration. Rapid data growth and porous infrastructures offer minimal protection against bad actors and employee ignorance. To mitigate such risks, HCOs must focus on resilience, which includes a strong culture of compliance. Empowering consumers to be gatekeepers of their data. Consumers must have control over who has access to their data, when, and for what purpose. To support consumers and build trust, HCOs must proactively establish the rules of consent, ownership, and sharing. Consumers in an ecosystem that relies heavily on personal data will feel empowered by HCOs that protect the ability to access their personal information. Today, healthcare consumers expect a solution at first contact. Consumers’ patience has worn thin, and the time for HCOs to act is now. New healthcare entrants, direct-to-consumer models, and transformative technologies are creating an increasingly competitive healthcare ecosystem. Successful organizations will lead with digital-first experiences and give consumers control of their healthcare journey. Healthcare leaders can harness our research on customer experience platforms for healthcare. Read our new report, titled Redefining Healthcare In An Always-On Digital Ecosystem, or schedule a guidance session. source

Customer marketers responsible for customer advocacy and references piece together an array of technologies to make their programs work. This includes niche solutions, purpose-built platforms, and multipurpose offerings. The Forrester Tech Tide™: B2B Customer Advocacy And Reference Technologies, Q4 2024, reflects this fractured market. As one practitioner noted, “There isn’t any single solution.” Frustration about the lack of a one-stop shop for customer advocacy became acute after the recent disruption of Influitive. Yet while the changes caused angst, they also spurred innovation. Marketers have plenty of options, and some categories overlap as vendors extend into adjacent capabilities and address different use cases. Here are my takeaways from the research. Moving From Random Acts To Strategic Advocacy Requires The Ability To Scale Advocate management and activation and customer content generation were the two categories customer marketers consistently called out for current and planned investment. That’s not a coincidence: B2B companies need to grow their advocate armies, which is one of the benefits of advocate management. They need to create substantial amounts of content to activate customer stories, which is a primary use case for customer content generation. Both categories offer the ability to scale. Example: Like the tree that falls in the forest, a customer success story can only influence buyers if that story reaches their ears (or screens). Creating content in consumable formats can be labor-intensive, especially in cases where the team might not have the skill sets or bandwidth to build quality testimonial videos or compelling event presentations. The customer content generation category benefits from generative AI and is the only one about which several practitioners, unprompted, said they could not live without. Next step: Identify your ongoing content needs as well as the gaps you could fill with help. Then investigate some of the options to ease the burden. Work Smarter With What’s In Place Several of the technologies marketers use to manage advocacy programs, such as social suites and revenue enablement platforms, aren’t advocacy-first. But customer marketers absolutely benefit — which means that customers benefit — from extending the use of these solutions. When the vendor is already in place but a different function owns that relationship, better collaboration is the key. Example: Social suites can identify potential customer storytellers and activate customers and even employees to extend reach by sharing customer success stories. The practitioners I spoke to sheepishly admitted that they wish they did a better job at collaborating with their PR or brand team on this. Next step: Just ask! Speak to your colleagues and explore how your vendor supports advocacy use cases. Be Willing To Break Up There’s respect for the current state, and then there’s clinging to “how it’s always been done.” Experimentation makes sense when resources are abundant or a decision-maker expresses keen interest in a vendor. Loyalty is understandable if a solution is part of the fabric of your current process or a vendor has been a great partner. But categories mature and stagnate, and business value is fluid. This Tech Tide showed that practitioners are willing to reprioritize, even if letting go is a bit painful. Example: For some programs, the authenticity of user-generated video serves the advocacy mission. For others, the need to plan and curate those videos and the risk of obtaining unusable material erase the perceived benefits. As one practitioner noted, just because someone can self-create a video does not mean that they should. Next step: Plan an internal assessment for technology that’s due for discussion. If it’s data-supported and intellectually honest, you’ll make the right call. Forrester clients can read the Tech Tide here. source

Much is spent on advertising every holiday season, but the key ingredient of persuasive advertising — compelling creative — is scarce. Why Is Compelling Creative So Rare? For too long, creative has been caught between two cultures: one of creative directors honing storytelling apart from media buying, and another of performance marketers trying to make creative more measurable. Both know that effective creative simultaneously builds brands and stimulates direct responses, but it’s much easier said than done. Compelling creative requires a concise, cyclical process that tightly integrates the next big idea with cross-channel media planning. It requires deep empathy between designers and paid media practitioners. A faster, more data-driven creative process that cross-pollinates creative and media intelligence can be the difference between disengaging and deeply persuasive advertising this holiday season. To get more compelling creative, brands and agencies should: Integrate creative and media briefs and teams. Performance marketers and creative directors should jointly decide which medium and message to use for running and stress-testing decisions. Use multivariate tests to (in-)validate creative concepts and challenge winning variables. Throughout, make your guide the voices of customers, not the opinions of the highest-paid people in the room. Unlock technologies’ workflow and analytical efficiencies. Creative advertising technologies help advertisers, both in house and at agencies, lower risk inherent in the creative process and turn creative into a lever of brand and performance. Creative automation exponentially increases creative volume. Dynamic creative optimization facilitates deep personalization based on inferences of intent. Creative intelligence reveals why ads win or lose, helping creative and media teams decide, for instance, whether to run snow-related text treatments this season. Create For Consumer Fragmentation You’ll need to optimize creative across channels as audiences span ever more formats and devices. Marketers running audio ads can test scripts via paid search. Results reduce costs per click on Google and Bing as well as costs per impression on Spotify and Audible. Marketers running digital out-of-home campaigns should build several variations; personalize them based on weather, location, and time of day; and deploy winning variables across providers ranging from Uber to Lamar. Similarly, TV creative should be atomized and tested pre- and in-flight. Variables ranging from the pitch of a siren wailing in an ad’s background to the breed of dog featured in an ad’s first few seconds significantly impact TV advertising’s efficacy. As you produce, test, and measure creative this holiday season, check out our research, including The Forrester Wave™: Creative Advertising Technologies, Q4 2024, How To Use Technology To Develop Better Ad Creative, and The Ad Creative Competency Assessment Tool. As always, feel free to schedule time to discuss via inquiry or guidance session. source

The increased availability of digital-first experiences has encouraged consumers to take control of their healthcare journey. Today, 44% of consumers indicate that in the last 12 months, they started using a wearable, smart devices, and/or medical devices to support their overall health. Most consumers prefer to do health-related activities, such as refilling a prescription, finding a doctor, or checking their symptom, by using a web browser or an app. In response, healthcare organizations (HCOs) must use continuous digital-first strategies and customer experience platforms that build sustained engagement. HCOs need to design experiences that are dynamic and evolve with customers’ changing priorities and preferences. HCOs must also support customers with clear language, empathy, transparency, and ease. HCOs: Prepare To Give Consumers Control Healthcare delivery and services are full of roadblocks. HCOs often fail to deliver promises to consumers, such as granting more control of their data and protecting their personal information from cyberattacks. Opaque experiences and complex jargon have eroded consumer confidence and incentivized some to leave brands behind. Consumers will choose HCOs that emphasize their needs and that increasingly gather and rely on their feedback to deliver value. The integration of next-gen technologies, below-the-glass experiences, and customer obsession is already laying the foundation for advances in personalized medicine and increased access to health information. As consumer experiences in healthcare rapidly transform, HCOs need to create effective experiences that foster lasting loyalty by: Easing consumer experiences by using generative AI to upskill employees. Automatically summarizing a medical record for employees relieves consumers of the burden of repetitive questions about their past medical history and social determinants of health needs. It also frees employees’ time for other, more productive tasks. Bolstering security and protecting data privacy. HCOs are increasingly susceptible to cyberattacks and data breaches due to technology concentration. Rapid data growth and porous infrastructures offer minimal protection against bad actors and employee ignorance. To mitigate such risks, HCOs must focus on resilience, which includes a strong culture of compliance. Empowering consumers to be gatekeepers of their data. Consumers must have control over who has access to their data, when, and for what purpose. To support consumers and build trust, HCOs must proactively establish the rules of consent, ownership, and sharing. Consumers in an ecosystem that relies heavily on personal data will feel empowered by HCOs that protect the ability to access their personal information. Today, healthcare consumers expect a solution at first contact. Consumers’ patience has worn thin, and the time for HCOs to act is now. New healthcare entrants, direct-to-consumer models, and transformative technologies are creating an increasingly competitive healthcare ecosystem. Successful organizations will lead with digital-first experiences and give consumers control of their healthcare journey. Healthcare leaders can harness our research on customer experience platforms for healthcare. Read our new report, titled Redefining Healthcare In An Always-On Digital Ecosystem, or schedule a guidance session. source

2024 has been a challenging year for B2B marketing, sales, and product leaders, and driving transformation against the backdrop of changing buyer behaviors, waning trust, constrained budgets, and breakneck technological innovation is not easy. It’s time to celebrate transformational success and the progress that your organization has made to ignite action and escape inertia. Have you improved your organization’s understanding of buyers, customers, and markets to drive tangible results? Have you adapted to address self-service behaviors, AI’s influence on buying and selling, and the generational shift in business buyers to differentiate your business? Have you evolved to meet the rise of complex buying groups to drive growth? If so, we’d like to hear from you. We are seeking nominations for the prestigious B2B Return On Integration Honors and Programs Of The Year Awards, which we’ll present at B2B Summit North America 2025 in early spring. Now is your chance to showcase your company’s achievements and elevate your presence amid your industry peers. Submissions are due by December 16 (and can be made here). The deadline will be here before you know it, so don’t delay. Here’s more about the two awards categories: The 2025 B2B Return On Integration Honors will showcase organizations that have: Focused on aligning product, marketing, sales, and customer engagement goals. Demonstrated integration of product, marketing, sales, and customer engagement functions (must include two or more functions). Measured outcome-based metrics to tell the story of success. We will recognize Return On Integration Honors winners on the Summit mainstage, where C-level execs will have the opportunity to engage in a conversation about this recognition. The 2025 Programs Of The Year Awards recognize organizations that have: Delivered outstanding achievements in a particular area of product, marketing, sales, or customer engagement. Leveraged innovative frameworks and best practices to improve functional performance. Winners for Programs Of The Year Awards will be selected based on role (e.g., marketing executive, sales leader, demand and account-based marketing leader, portfolio marketing and/or product management leader, revenue operations leader, partner ecosystem marketing leader, customer engagement leader, and content strategy and/or operations leader). We will dedicate sessions within our program to showcase your story within this functional area. What Makes A Winning Submission? Your submission should tell a powerful story of escaping inertia and igniting action to improve company performance. Avoid general statements and focus instead on specific actions and measurable outcomes that demonstrate the depth of your transformation and its impact on your business. For example, avoid stating things such as “The sales, marketing, and product departments now collaborate better” and instead detail the exact actions taken, such as “Executives and key stakeholders aligned on these specific strategic priorities; we synchronized cross-functional plans in the following ways for maximum efficiency; and we implemented an adaptive planning process to ensure continued alignment as market conditions evolve.” Submit your nominations for the Return On Integration Honors or Programs Of The Year Awards by Monday, December 16. We look forward to showcasing the winners on stage at B2B Summit North America! source

According to Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, 69% of global B2C decision-makers increased their investment in content management technology, up from 59% who did so in 2023. Web content management software growth now outpaces the growth of the broader software market and is poised to reach $15.3 billion (total addressable market) by 2028. Business investment and growth in this content management system (CMS) market are primarily driven by: The proliferation of content-driven digital experiences across a growing number of digital touchpoints, which requires robust management capabilities. An increase in consumer demand for speed in their digital experiences, which requires outstanding experience delivery. Increasing investment in digital transformations generating new use cases, which requires new content-led digital experiences. New CMS Research Focuses On Business Impacts Of Emerging Features, Not Chasing Shiny Objects Through six months of research across the CMS vendor community, our October 2024 report, Strategic Technology Selection Guide For Content Management Systems, gives leaders a deeper understanding of the emerging trends in content management tech, from visual builders to content studios. Approaching the CMS landscape through the strategic lenses of business revenue and cost drivers helps leaders correctly prioritize emerging features for impact to business outcomes. Further, these two new reports help leaders develop targeted vendor shortlists amid the following challenges and trends: Communicating generative AI’s value to executives and boards. Generative AI capabilities in CMSes are impacting content operations, team efficiencies, and cost drivers across enterprises, but clearly communicating the current and future investment of CMSes enabled with enhanced genAI features remains a challenge. Selecting the right architecture and solution. Confusing messaging and varied capabilities of CMSes have made the decision between platforms vs. composability and “pure headless” vs. “hybrid” solutions more challenging than ever. Capitalizing on technology investments. The future of content management and consumption is changing rapidly. Evaluating CMS trends helps leaders balance results today while helping them evaluate emerging features that they can capitalize on as consumers and technology change. Let’s Connect As you work through your CMS strategy and selection, schedule a guidance session with me to correctly navigate the challenges and trends listed above. source