Fatih Bakay, Solution Engineer, Customer Experience, Oracle
"It's hard to leave the legacy systems behind you and then make it to the transformation. [Many marketers] are relying on their legacy systems for as long as they are working. Oracle is coming from a database infrastructure background, so it will take maybe another five years until we get even a step further and done with the transformation."
Jeffrey Rohrs, CMO, Yext
"Digital transformation implies, to me, having all the different products of the stack in place, working optimally. We've made a conscious decision to push on the implementation of several things that people are saying: 'Oh you need this and this.' Because we've discovered that we don't. There are certain parts of marketing automation that we don't need to implement immediately because we need to focus on the people and the process they expect of us first, and get that aligned. People rush to technology too quickly."
Tiankai Feng, Senior Manager, Global Analytics, adidas
"The technology is evolving faster than people and processes. We're going in the right direction, and everybody's making a lot of efforts, but we're not 100% there yet.
"I will say, there's a lot of visionary and top leadership in our company. We get a lot of young talent and also very forward-thinking talent. So top-down and also bottom-up, it's all basically helping to contribute to the success, and just not being stuck in this traditional thinking and being stubborn about it."
Lewis Rothkopf, General Manager, Media and Growth Channels, MediaMath
"We are at the halfway point of the transformation. Marketers have recognized, and acknowledged that to be a marketer you need to be a digital marketer. Marketers and their partners are understanding what that means, and what goes into that, and a lot of the groundwork has been laid. More and more, the CMO is the most data-driven person in the company, and the CMO is now a very close partner with the chief information officer and the chief data officer. Companies [now] have chief digital transformation officers. These are acknowledgements that this has to happen, and that it has had to happen for quite some time. We see the horizon, but we're not quite there yet."