Marketing claims its rightful place at the boardroom table
Emma Chalwin, Brand Marketing Director, Adobe
So, it’s the start of a brand new year, and industry predictions for 2013 are spreading like wildfire – will it be the year that marketers finally crack social ROI, or campaign attribution, or that it will be the year of the tablet etc. etc.
These aren’t new per se, but what they do point to is the vast challenges and opportunities facing marketing right now. It seems like nearly every day a new channel, a new platform, a new device, a new technique becomes ‘the next big thing’ and marketing is the one industry that is at the centre of it all.
What this does mean is that CMOs have to manage enormous change and really at a pace never seen before. Competitive differentiation means being to market first with new ways of reaching and engaging with customers, but not everything takes off immediately, and not every channel is definitely worth investing time and money. It’s ultimately risky.
For me, a recent report highlighted perfectly the pressure CMOs are under – 70 per cent of CEOs said that they have lost trust in marketing mainly because the department consistently fails to deliver growth. The report then went on to say that CEOs had an innate lack of trust because of marketing’s reputation; they felt that marketing had no real influence on the organisation as a whole, and that most marketers could never go onto real senior position in the business.
It becomes ‘marketing’s problem’
Pretty damning stuff, in a way though, you can see where CEOs are coming from. The huge changes driving the way consumers want to interact with businesses seem to converge on the marketing department. It becomes ‘marketing’s problem’ so to speak, and the entire business starts asking why they aren’t doing more to take advantage of the digital zeitgeist.
Well, it all comes down to the almost endless possibilities the digital world opens up for marketers and the pace of technological change means that if you want to be first you can’t dip your toes in to test reaction, you have got to jump in. Not only is this is a risky strategy that sometimes doesn’t pay off, marketing budgets are also finite.
But, for marketers this really doesn’t have to be a negative story – this digital revolution also has given us the capability to bust wide open the ROI and measurement argument so often cited by the board. Everything can now be tracked and marketing campaigns can be directly measured alongside business sales cycles. And the technology that enables this is now more attainable and effective than ever before.
Targeting, web experience management, social engagement, advertising
What excites me, is that everything we’re doing at the moment is about putting the technological power into the hands of the marketer – from real time data analysis and insight, to targeting, web experience management, social engagement, advertising and on the fly campaign changes. We’re definitely not shutting out the IT department; we have been working to make the infrastructure management, implementation, deployment and maintenance as easy and painless as possible by putting all of our solutions in the cloud, the Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud.
In fact, Gartner recently predicted that by 2017, the CMO might have a bigger slice of the IT budget than the CIO. Perhaps we’re still way off this in reality, but this shows the real and important changes afoot. This is further backed up by an Economist Intelligence Unit report on the challenges CMOs face in the boardroom which showed that 21 per cent of the executives surveyed said that one of the top three skills a CMO should have is technical expertise.
This is already playing out in the industry, with a growing groundswell in 2012 on the role of chief marketing technologist, a strategic amalgamation of CMO and CTO. The role exists to ensure all the data produced by the business and its customers on every channel both offline and online is brought together to provide actionable insight which is then played back into multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Back to Gartner, in August its Planning for 2013 Marketing Budgets report stated that 72% of 345 high- tech providers said they already have a chief marketing technologist role today, with 87% expecting to create this role within 2 years. However, it is still difficult to evaluate how prominent this role (Gartner report focused on high tech providers only) will or will not become in the future, or where indeed this role will sit – in the IT department or the marketing department. Nevertheless this does point to how the CMO is evolving.
What is for certain is that marketing is facing an exciting time. Never before has it, as a discipline, been so measurable, or indeed central to the business. CMOs can now prove, beyond gut feel, the effectiveness of their campaigns on the bottom line. This has been the basis of our most recent campaign which intends to dispel the commonly held misconception that marketing is BS, and to urge the industry to focus on metrics not myths. Surely it’s time now for CEOs to take note.