VC Firm Predicts Marketing Technology Investments Will Climb To $120 Billion Over Next 10 Years

Venture capitalist Ashu Garg predicts marketers are going to be spending ten times what they currently spend on marketing technology over the next ten years.

In Garg’s recently published “MarTech and the Decade of the CMO” white paper, the general partner at Foundation Capital says he expects the current $12 billion CMOs invest in software and technology will climb to $120 billion by 2025.

The CMO of tomorrow is the data nerd of today.

According to Garg, only one percent of marketing budgets currently go to software/tech investments. He forecasts this amount to increase substantially over the next decade as the role of the CMO transitions into what Garg defines as the “CeO” or Chief Experience Officer, “owning the end-to-end customer experience.”

“While the growth rate of overall marketing spend will remain unchanged,” says Garg, “Its composition will change dramatically and technology will command a larger share of the budget.”

Garg’s paper lists a number of other marketing forecasts, including how more than 80 percent of all media will be consumed digitally by 2020.

“We predict that consumers will spend more than 50 percent of their time consuming media (or 360+ minutes per day) on their mobile devices,” writes Garg who goes on to claim 100 percent of all print, radio and television advertising will be sold programmatically eventually.

The paper references a Gartner survey of CEOs that listed digital marketing, e-commerce and customer experience management as the top three most important technology-related business needs, driving home the point that the three leading overall technology-related priorities for CEOs all fall under the responsibility of the CMO.

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Garg’s paper makes the case that to survive in the coming years, CMOs will need to focus on: marketing ROI, media buying, content creation, mass personalization and taking a larger role in closing the deal.

The full paper can be downloaded from Foundation Capital’s website here: MarTech and the Decade of the CMO: How the software revolution will grow 10X in 10 years.