In the space of a month, I travelled for two of our customer events: the Global Agentic Marketing Summit in Bali (for our South-East Asian customers) and in Bangkok (for our Indian customers). The name has changed over the years — from Hashout to MGS (Martech Global Summit) to GAMS. [See Life Notes #66: MGS Colombo and Life Notes #21: MarTech Global Summit.]
The names themselves tell the story of our industry. Hashout was about email and engagement. MGS was about the whole martech stack, and about going global. GAMS is about agents doing the work that marketers until recently did by hand. Three names in a few years is not restlessness about branding — it is the rate at which the ground under marketing is moving. I am curious what we will be calling it two summits from now.
I like these events because of the interaction with customers (and prospects) in a relaxed setting, and the opportunity they give me to share my thinking on martech on the opening day. I typically start working on my deck a few weeks in advance, bringing together the latest thinking from my blog essays and showcasing the new product thinking at Netcore. This time, I tried a new approach to the presentation: instead of the standard PPT, I decided to do HTML. Over the past few months, I have moved away from the static deck to one that’s more interactive. I can click and show within a slide, and it’s so much easier to make and edit with Claude.
The intimate nature of these events is great for relationship building. I did 9 1:1 meetings in Bangkok, which helped me understand the marketer’s lens much better. This is a time of change as AI and agents transform CRM and retention marketing. The drudgery of marketing is being replaced by a new excitement — the ability to build deeper and better relationships which can deliver profitable growth and eliminate the AdWaste caused by reacquisition.
The other aspect of these events that I like is the travel. Of late, my US visits have gone down (in fact, none for the past 2 years), so the long flights which I relish for deep thinking and reading have not been happening. Bali was an overnight flight to Singapore, and then a 2.5-hour flight onwards. (The return was via Singapore for a brief vacation with family.) For Bangkok, I chose the afternoon flight so I got 4+ hours of contiguous time to think, read, and write.
Both summits ended with the same thing: people lingering. Long after the last session — in the lobby, at dinner, at the breakfast table the next morning — marketers who could have got the whole deck by email were still there, talking. We spent two days discussing how agents will handle the millions of conversations a brand has with its customers. And then we proved, without meaning to, that the conversations which matter most are still the ones you have in person.
