Rusty Warner

VP, Principal Analyst

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Blog

Invisible Experiences: Anticipate Customer Needs With Real-Time Interaction Management

Rusty Warner February 16, 2024
Imagine having a butler who anticipates and serves your needs. Just as Alfred faithfully supports Batman, your personal assistant earns your trust through silent understanding. Now think of this relationship in terms of your experiences with brands. Do those experiences feel invisible and immersive? In Gotham City, Alfred ensures that Batman’s utility belt is always […]
Blog

Art Offers An AI Reality Check For Martech

Joe Stanhope January 16, 2024
Hanging prominently in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City is a giant infographic that explores the physical, technical, and social components of modern artificial intelligence. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s 2018 “Anatomy of an AI System” is a visual essay that spares no detail as it traces the lifecycle of an […]
Blog

Build A Roadmap For Collecting The Customer Data That You’ll Actually Use

Stephanie Liu June 22, 2023
Marketers want to capture as much zero- and first-party data as possible, whether that’s email addresses, marketing opt-ins and other consent, or more granular data about who a customer is and what they’re interested in. But consumers have more power to be selective about who they share data with and when and have become wary […]
Blog

Invest In A Cross-Channel Marketing Hub To Elevate Your Campaign Strategy

Rusty Warner March 21, 2023
Empowered customers expect seamless cross-channel experiences. B2C marketers must understand customers and create value exchanges in their individual moments of need. That’s a tough job if your martech ecosystem is overly complex or badly integrated — or both. A cross-channel marketing hub (CCMH) can help marketers overcome data and channel integration complexity to consistently engage […]
Blog

Don’t Rely On The Butterfly Effect To Measure Business Value

Rusty Warner March 17, 2023
It is critical for marketers and customer experience pros to align their respective metrics with shared business metrics. Use customer lifetime value alignment to achieve this.
Blog

Clean Up Your Martech And Loyalty Tech Ecosystem

Mary Pilecki October 3, 2022
We all know that there is a big difference between working hard and working smart. And specifically for marketers, the status quo often makes working smart impossible — functional silos inhibit internal efficiencies and negatively impact the overall customer experience. Some of today’s biggest marketing silos are technology-based — different platforms for different functions. Let’s […]
Blog

Invest In Real-Time Interaction Management To Elevate Your Long-Term Customer Experience Strategy

Rusty Warner May 26, 2022
It’s easy to conflate real-time interaction management (RTIM) with personalization tactics, but it goes far deeper. Forrester defines RTIM as: Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints. RTIM enables next best experience (NBX) decision-making in the face of changing […]
Blog

Medallia + Thunderhead Is A Boost For Brands On The VoC Maturity Journey

Colleen Fazio January 26, 2022
Customer feedback management (CFM) vendor Medallia’s announcement of its intention to acquire customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendor Thunderhead is an expected response to the Qualtrics acquisition of Usermind last year. As my colleague Joana de Quintanilha writes in her blog, customer journey orchestration platforms have been a hot commodity of late. The acquisitions of Usermind […]
Blog

Marketers Must Mind The Customer Journey Orchestration Gap

Rusty Warner January 26, 2022
Discover the questions to ask when considering customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendors, as acquisitions shake the space up.
Blog

Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms Are The Catch Of The Day

Joana de Quintanilha January 26, 2022
Customer feedback management vendor Medallia’s announcement of its intention to acquire customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendor Thunderhead is the fourth acquisition in the customer journey orchestration space in six months. First, CSG acquired Kitewheel, followed less than a week later by Qualtrics’ acquisition of both Usermind and Clarabridge. And in October, Genesys announced its acquisition […]
Blog

Banks Must Align Strategy And Technology To Succeed With Personalization

Aurelie L'Hostis October 7, 2021
Banks need a customer-led strategy to govern cross-functional personalization efforts and to determine the right technology investments.
Blog

Cross-Channel Campaign Management: A Mature Market Reinvents Itself

Rusty Warner August 12, 2021
The CCCM market is growing as independent players deliver innovation that outshines many of their more established competitors.
Blog

You Need A Martech Reference Model — Here’s Why

Rusty Warner July 14, 2021
Learn about Forrester's martech reference model to help marketers and their technology cohorts define their unique martech reference architecture.
Blog

Reboot Your Marketing Strategy With Cross-Channel Campaign Management

Rusty Warner April 29, 2021
Done right, CCCM delivers more than outbound campaigns. In this Forrester Wave™, we compare CCCM solutions from enterprise marketing software suite vendors.
Blog

Explore Real-Time Interaction Management Solution Options With The Latest Forrester Wave™

Rusty Warner October 20, 2020
My colleague Joe Stanhope and I have previously written about “The Future Of Enterprise Marketing Technology” and how it hinges on marketing alignment with customer experience (CX) strategies. To be successful, marketers must orchestrate personalized experiences that deliver value in their customers’ moments of need. But brands must “Align Strategy And Technology To Deliver Next-Gen […]
Blog

Adobe Summit Offers Some “Classic” Themes In A New Format

Allen Bonde April 6, 2020
The spike in online commerce, the importance of experiences (and data to power them), and the need for organizations of all types to accelerate their digital transformation were themes that were front and center at last week’s Adobe Summit 2020. Presented as a series of video keynotes and live BlueJeans-based panels and breakout sessions, this […]
Blog

Modern Marketers Must Manage Measurement

Rusty Warner March 11, 2020
Measuring marketing performance is not just a tongue twister; it’s hard work. Channel-specific metrics cause headaches, and reporting is a hodgepodge of data sources and dashboards from multiple martech and measurement tools. It’s even harder to align marketing performance metrics with customer-focused business objectives, but marketers can no longer pat themselves on the back for […]
Blog

The Martech Roundtable: The Past, Present, And Future Of Marketing Technology For Business And Consumer Marketers, Part 3

Rusty Warner February 18, 2020
In December, B2C marketing analysts Joe Stanhope and Rusty Warner and B2B marketing analyst Lori Wizdo hosted the second annual martech roundtable to help marketers make informed decisions against the backdrop of these exciting and disruptive trends in marketing technology. In the third and final installment of our martech roundtable webinar recap, we’ll discuss important […]
Blog

The Martech Roundtable: The Past, Present, And Future Of Marketing Technology For Business And Consumer Marketers, Part 2

Lori Wizdo February 18, 2020
In December, B2C marketing analysts Joe Stanhope and Rusty Warner and B2B marketing analyst Lori Wizdo hosted the second annual martech roundtable to help marketers make informed decisions against the backdrop of these exciting and disruptive trends in marketing technology. In part two of our martech roundtable webinar recap, we’ll delve into high-level marketing trends […]
Blog

The Martech Roundtable: The Past, Present, And Future Of Marketing Technology For Business And Consumer Marketers, Part 1

Joe Stanhope February 12, 2020
Navigating the marketing technology ecosystem is more challenging than ever before. These takeaways from our recent martech roundtable webinar can help marketers make informed decisions.
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