What You Need to Know

•  Iterable CEO Andrew Boni says the launch of "Iterable Nova" marks the end of traditional, brand-centric campaigns in favour of AI-driven, individualised customer engagement.
• Nova replaces static workflows and audience segments with hyper-personalised, AI-generated strategies tailored to individual users, says Boni. That means shifting marketers from creators to editors.
• The future of martech meanwhile, involves auto-generating content, journeys, audiences, and predictive goals aligned to business objectives, learning and adapting based on marketer feedback.
• Goal-based, not rules-based: Like a self-driving car, in future marketers will use AI to pursue defined business goals, such as revenue targets, finding optimal paths without needing detailed manual input, according to Boni.

Campaigns are out. Conversations are in, according to Iterable CEO and co-founder, Andrew Boni. And he’s not whispering it from the sidelines. He’s standing on stage, dropping the curtain on a marketing model that’s defined the last two decades, and launching a platform he claims is built to replace it.

Nova, Iterable’s new AI-powered orchestration engine, isn’t a feature release. It’s a provocation. A deliberate, strategic break from calendar-driven comms in favour of autonomous, goal-based engagement. The message is clear: Marketers who are still building audiences and pulling levers are already behind.

It should be noted Iterable is not out on a limb. Instead, it has addressed a trend that research analysts have been flagging for some time. Constellation Research, for instance, says on its website, "A new age of marketing has arrived, where customer and revenue reign supreme and the Chief Marketing Officer is the driver and orchestrator of growth. Gone are the days of loosely connected campaign-driven operations guided by marketing metrics derived from rear-view mirror looks into past performance.

"Transformational marketing practices are actively shifting towards autonomous operations engines that empower teams sitting far beyond marketing’s own walls to ensure engagements and experiences stand at the ready to meet the customer’s expectations and their micro-moments of need. Digital transformation is not “enough”…marketing as a whole must transform and transcend channel."

This is not simply a technology shift. For its part, Forrester Research says businesses accustomed to product-centric marketing often resist the retraining required to shift to a customer-centric approach. To facilitate this transformation, in addition to training their own teams, portfolio marketing leaders must help the rest of the organisation understand the positive business impact of go-to-market decisions that are informed by buyer and customer insights, the analyst firm advises. 

The big dogs of digital, including Meta are also banking on the shift. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery, "Just say to the AI, ‘Here’s the outcome I want, here’s what I’ll pay, get me as many outcomes as you can...You don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting, you don’t need any measurement [although cynics might say there's a reason Meta wants to move clients away from measurement]."

New era

With the launch of his company's “Nova,” platform Iterable's Boni is drawing a bright line between the future of marketing and its past.

Per Boni: "It’s a death knell for the traditional campaign era.”

For a platform built on workflows and audience segments, that’s no small pivot. But Boni insists it’s necessary. Campaigns, he tells Mi3, are too episodic, too rigid, and too brand-centric. “Things are all fine, and they work for brands, but it's just a very old school way of thinking, and it's very rigid. It doesn't really meet customers where they are. It's very much brand centric.”

Model will shift dramatically, Boni claims. AI will be embedded deeply inside platforms to create what he describes as a “step change” in how marketers engage.

An audience-of-one

In its early days, Iterable was a workhorse martech platform, continues Boni. It was flexible and powerful but also demanding.

Boni reflects on that legacy: “The marketers… had to really do a lot of the thinking, a lot of the heavy lifting… they almost, I would say, could run into writer’s block.” That changes under Nova. “It is going to tell the marketers what it thinks they should do, what’s going to drive the highest ROI based on their specific goals as a business.”

Instead of segmenting lists and building journeys from scratch, marketers now get prescriptive recommendations generated by the system. “It’s going to give them something to quickly react to,” says Boni. “Now the marketers don’t have to do it… but it really shortens the time to value.”

Boni also talks about individualisation, rather than personalisation. “Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, a campaign was sending the same message to your 1 million customers… you had five messages you’re sending to groups of 200,000… very quickly… these cohorts are getting smaller and smaller and more and more and more tailored,” he says. “If you’re sending out a message that’s bespoke to one person, can you really call it a campaign? To me, that is something completely different.”

Marketers move from creators to editors as AI takes the wheel

From the Iterable's perspective, marketers aren’t authors anymore either; they’re editors. The system generates campaign structures, writes content, builds audiences, and optimises against declared goals.

“You can… say, ‘Hey, summertime is coming up. Help me come up with a comprehensive marketing strategy for the summer,’” explains Boni. "The platform will understand a lot about the business… so having all this context is able to spit out a very thoughtful, very contextually aware strategy.

“It’ll start crafting the content. It’ll start building the journeys. It’ll start creating the predictive goals. It’ll start building the audiences.”

Marketers can accept or reject the suggestions, and the system learns. “It’s going to have a point of view… and here are the reasons why,” he says. “You can say, ‘Sounds good, thumbs up, let’s do it’ or ‘No, actually, I don’t want to do it for these reasons.’ And the system is going to learn.”

Goal-based engagement

Traditional martech is rules-based, but Boni believes the future is goal-based, comparing it to self-driving cars.

“The goal is to get you to your destination,” he says. “I don’t necessarily mind or even need to know or care about the fact that… it’s going to slightly reroute us… all I really care about is getting to my destination safe and sound.”

That abstraction applies to marketing: “Maybe I’m a brand and my number one goal is driving as much revenue as possible in a particular quarter… [Nova] is going to uncover a different path that is actually much more efficient at driving towards our particular goal.”

And it’s all happening inside Iterable without the need for third-party integrations to activate these capabilities. “There would be no dependencies,” claims Boni. “Once we have that feedback loop, that’s all we need to get off and running.”