Technology shapes nearly every aspect of how customers and businesses interact. Some of it is visible: payment systems, self-service checkouts, advertising screens, immersive displays. Most of it isn't: AI vision cameras, digital tracking, customer data platforms, automation. These marketing technologies have become central to how modern businesses operate. They also change rapidly, are rarely used to their full value, and carry significant implications for the people on the other side of them.
RMIT's Marketing Technology Lab (MTL) exists to help industry and consumers face these challenges together. It's the first dedicated marketing technology facility in the Asia-Pacific to bring together industry leading software with physical and virtual facilities, and home to Australia's first undergraduate major in the field. The MTL is where the technologies behind modern customer experiences are made visible, tested, and taught.
The MTL delivers hands-on, industry-connected learning through lab facilities, a full MarTech stack, and embedded partnerships. Students work hands-on with the platforms industry actually uses. They build campaigns, design customer journeys, run experiments and analyse real customer data, so they graduate able to both operate the technology and judge what it's doing. Faculty use the MTL to integrate applied, technology-driven learning across programs, positioning RMIT as a destination for Marketing Technology.
The MTL advances research by connecting PhD students, researchers, and industry partners with access to industry-leading technology. We produce independent, evidence-based research on what marketing technology actually does, and how to use it responsibly to provide trusted, vendor-agnostic sources of evidence. Our unique blend of physical, digital, and virtual technologies (see Our Facility) empowers cross-disciplinary research on topics ranging from optimising marketing automation flows, to the impact of virtual immersion on consumer decision making.
The MTL facilitates a strong MarTech ecosystem through industry partnerships, events, and funding initiatives. We work with industry partners to test ideas, solve real problems and share what we learn through events, briefings and collaborative projects. Partners gain early access to talent, to evidence, and to a live environment for trying things before committing to them.
The Lab works with industry partners and technology providers across teaching, research and engagement to provide students access to industry-leading technology. All partnerships are tech-agnostic and non-exclusive ways, because the Lab is independent and not tied to any vendor.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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