A seat at the table: The new role of marketer | #MME16 by R. Danes | May 3, 2016 A company’s marketing team has historically toiled in relative obscurity while CEOs and managers received both credit and blame for performance. However, Big Data technology is transforming marketing as we know it, along with the role of the marketer. Ryan Buma, GVP of AppCloud at Oracle Marketing Cloud, said marketers are now being given “a seat at the table” like never before. Peter Isaacson, CMO of Demandbase, Inc., a B2B marketing platform, agrees that marketers are going to be seen as more dynamic and results-accountable, thanks to the new tech that is changing the game. “I think it’s that ability to drive business impact that is giving marketers that seat at the table,” he told John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event. “Once you can actually say, ‘You know what? Marketing contributed this amount to our business. We helped this type of close rate. We actually drove this amount of bookings,’ then people want to listen,” he explained. Where it’s at: Data at the center of marketing transformation Buma spoke about the crucial importance of data to any company looking to make the digital marketing transformation. He claimed Oracle Marketing Cloud’s horizontally scalable data layer makes it one of the better product options available. “It doesn’t make sense to me at all as a marketer why I would buy a point solution that didn’t have rich integration capabilities and a great data platform underneath it,” he said. “The data is so important.”