In other words, the people who want to sell you stuff nowadays know you and your habits very well, maybe better than you do, thanks to digital tools. Programmatic marketing is the name of the game, serving up the right ad at the right time to people, on an auction basis, using the data at hand. Done right, this is a good thing for everyone involved, as Danielle Uskovic, head of digital marketing for PC giant Lenovo, which uses Adobe's technology, explained.
Digital marketing has evolved very rapidly over the past few years, Uskovic said. Compared to the scattergun approach of the past, where you bombard people with untargeted ads in the hope of getting at least a few responses, technology means marketers are closer to customers than ever before, with data-derived insights.
"It makes me more efficient, saves money for Lenovo, and it's just a better experience for the consumer," Uskovic said.
Going digital also means cutting out the middlemen, the agencies who marketers paid in the past to develop media plans and to buy inventory. Now, it's possible for marketers to have direct relationships with publishers instead, which means greater transparency and accountability, Uskovic noted.
Making sure that the experience is better for customers who have become hypersensitive to sales pitches thanks to giant, intrusive privacy nightmares and security scares is a balancing act for digital marketing.
Who can forget Lenovo's giant gaffe two years ago, when the company thought it would be a good thing to ship the Superfish adware on its laptops?
In an era where people use adblockers as a security tool to avoid "malvertising" or being hit with viruses through advertisements, Uskovic said it's vital to have the utilities to verify what's being shown on potential customers' devices, and to make sure it's safe.
Likewise, technology helps marketers avoid digital fraud - Uskovic said her tools have reduced fraud to levels below 3 per cent.
For the marketing crowd though and their tech suppliers, there are some giant elephants in the room.
First, why bother with Adobe's digital marketing software, in a virtual world that's almost entirely dominated by giants like Facebook and Google?
Uskovic explained that it's a hugely important matter of having someone independent without skin in the game - Facebook and Google are giant advertising platforms, and that's how they make their billions in revenue.
"When you look at Google, they're playing the game, they're scoring it, and they're refereeing it," Uskovic said.
Second, while technology brings new capabilities and many benefits to marketers, is the endgame that machine learning and artificial intelligence takes their jobs like in so many other industries?
Uskovic doesn't think she'll be replaced by a clever algorithm any time soon - "there needs to be someone who understands this, and there have to be jobs" - but many functions in marketing will be automated by technology, she believes.
We'll see what happens, but one thing's for sure - being a marketing person in 2017 means getting your geek on, and it'll only be more so in the future.
Juha Saarinen attended the Sydney Adobe Symposium 2017 as a guest of the company.
