Chief Marketing Technologist

CMOs to agencies: adapt or die

The CMO Council released their latest report on client/agency effectiveness this week. (You can download a free executive summary from that link, or spring $199 for the full report.)

Out of the myriad of survey-driven stats from 6,000 corporate marketers across a wide range of major brands, one figure stands out as particularly striking: only 9% of senior marketers believe traditional ad agencies are doing a good job of evolving and extending their service capabilities in the digital age.

When 91% of your customers think you're a dinosaur, that can't be good.

From the CMO Council's press release:

"There's an underlying level of frustration among senior corporate marketers worldwide when it comes to agency contributions to business value creation, strategic thinking, and digital marketing development," noted Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, whose members control more than $300 billion in aggregated marketing spend each year. "Our members report quite a bit of switching of digital marketing resources, as well as a view that big, global agencies don't have a truly integrated offering and capacity to execute in an effective, localized way in emerging markets.

So what are marketers doing about this dissatisfaction?

• 49% are planning to change or consolidate agency rosters within the next 12 months (another 15% are considering it)
• 48% are hiring specialized digital marketing solution and service providers to implement new social, mobile, and interactive strategies
• 47% plan to build internal capabilities and use incumbent agency services less
• 45% are bringing in outside consultants to help set up and structure digital programs

Ring. Ring. "Hello, managing director, it's Charles Darwin on line 1."

Agencies and the marketing technologist revolution

Today I'm presenting at Adobe's Partner Community Day in New York City on the topic of the rise of marketing technologist.

This is an updated and extended version of talks I gave last year at Search Insider Summit and Pivot. Since a large number of agencies will be in the audience, I'll also discuss what this marketing technologist revolution means for them.

Here are the slides:

Rise of the Marketing Technologist (And What It Means For Agencies)

View more presentations from Scott Brinker

And here's an essay version of my talk:

Rise of the Marketing Technologist (and What It Means for Agencies)

Greetings! It helps to know a little about who's making proclamations. As a brief introduction, I've been a hybrid software developer and marketer since the early days of the Web. For the past four years, I've been blogging about the intersection of these two disciplines and how technology is changing the practice and management of marketing. In 1998, I co-founded an interactive agency that survived and thrived through the first dot-com bubble. About 5 years ago, we transformed that agency into a specialized marketing technology vendor, ion interactive, with customers such as Dell, DHL, General Mills, Intuit. I've had the privilege of seeing the evolution of marketing technology from several perspectives.

So what's a marketing technologist, anyway? Is it just another label for a digital strategist? A creative technologist? Something else?

First, a word on digital. Using highly advanced predictive analytics, I think we can call this fight: digital has won. Sure, there might be a few skirmishes out there, but the writing is on the Facebook wall. For a few points on the curve, consider the stats published by AdAge in July showing how jobs growth is skyrocketing in Internet media — even through our pseudo-recession — while jobs have been stagnating or shrinking in traditional media. Or the latest STRATA survey of agency executives showing digital now on par with TV as the medium of choice.

But probably the best evidence of digital's supremacy is the Apple Store. Laptops, smartphones, tablets — these are the devices that now serve as the interface between customers and companies, especially in the crucial "getting to know you" stage.

All this is to say that digital strategy and marketing strategy must be one and the same.

Given that, it's no surprise that digital strategists have been fruitful and multiplied in agencies. In fact, most agencies are now on the second generation of digital strategists, where the role has forked to encompass digitally-savvy account planners and a bevy of digital marketing specialists for search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social media, display advertising, content marketing, mobile, and more.

It almost goes without saying: a digital strategist must be fluent in using technology. Actually, we can revise that more broadly: pretty much every modern marketer needs to be fluent in using technology.

But not necessarily building it.

Enter the creative technologist...

In agencies, this is where the creative technologist has emerged. What's a creative technologist? Well, consider their anatomy: a great creative technologist has the brain of a software developer and the heart of an artist. Ideally, the eye of an interface designer. And often the balls of a hacker (figuratively speaking). The best creative technologists are fearless about tinkering, experimenting, pushing the envelope.

More formally, a creative technologist builds the technology for creative digital campaigns. (Obviously, right?) They're the ones who work with HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, APIs, MVC frameworks, Facebook apps, iOS, Android, games, dynamic ads, and more. If you work in an agency and spend a lot of time on Facebook's developers site, you're probably a creative technologist.

This has led to the modern creative triumvirate: an art director, a copywriter, and a creative technologist — images, words, and code. And not just in some disconnected pipeline. This is a collaborative unit, with the technologists at the table from the beginning, brainstorming original creative concepts.

Skittles' Experience The Rainbow. Nissan's My Versa Road Trip. Even Adobe's The Expressive Web, serving more of a B2P market. These are all terrific examples of the work produced with creative technologists. Really awesome stuff. And under the hood, pretty technically advanced.

Agencies are becoming more and more technically sophisticated — granted, some still faster than others. The digital strategist, in all its different incarnations, and the creative technologist are key roles. But they are primarily agency roles.

Something else is happening, across the agency-client client divide... a fundamental shift is underway in most marketing departments, from being technology adverse — to technology savvy.

The ZMOT changes everything

"I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms — I'm up to my eyeballs in technology." This is a quote from an exasperated CMO at the Forrester CIO-CMO Forum last month, and I think it perfectly sums up the magnitude of the transformation underway in marketing.

But let's start with the root cause.

Not too long ago, marketing flowed like this:

• Consumers were exposed to a stimulus, such as advertising.
• Later, at the store, they would choose which product to buy — the "first moment of truth."
• When they actually used the product at home, they would decide if they liked it — the second moment of truth.

This model is for consumer packaged goods, but there are analogies for more considered purchases and B2B. It enabled a nice division of labor. In this model, the stimulus was the agency's responsibility. The product, the second moment of truth, was the marketer's responsibility. And depending on the product and its distribution channels, they met somewhere in the middle at the first moment of truth.

But over recent years, that nice, simple model has been thoroughly disrupted by what Google calls the zero moment of truth, the ZMOT. After being exposed to a stimulus, prospects go online to learn about the product, the company, the category. Most importantly they go to get a sense of what real customers — people who have experienced that second moment of truth — have to say.

The ZMOT is a flurry of activity. Prospects query search engines, visit your web site, read educational content, follow related accounts on Twitter, visitor competitors' sites, read reviews, discuss with friends, check online communities, comparison shop, etc. And it's in this expansive and frenetic zero moment of truth that customers are now frequently won or lost.

This is the root cause of marketing's disruption. And it's worth digging deeper into what I see as the 5 killer properties of the ZMOT. They're "killer" in the 80's hyperbolic sense that they're amazing — but also because, well, they can kill you (professionally speaking).

First, the ZMOT is almost entirely digital or digital-ish — even real world events, calls to call centers, visits with a sales rep, coupons from the store, discussions with friends sent via email or remarked on Facebook, etc., have a tendency to end up echoing somewhere in the digital domain.

Second, the ZMOT is not a single instant — it's a whole stream of touchpoints. Google researched ZMOT activity for consumers in different categories and showed that, for instance, the typical automobile shopper acquires input from 18.2 different sources in considering a purchase — and over 97% of those shoppers are influenced at the ZMOT.

Third, the ZMOT is shaped by real-time dynamics. The FMOT lasts 7 seconds. But prospects live in the ZMOT for anywhere from a few hours to weeks or months, depending on the product category. A prospect's perspective and interest evolves over this time period, and there's a tremendous opportunity for marketing to adapt with them — and with respect to their digital vapor trail and external events. This includes personalization and retargeting, but it's more than that.

Fourth, the ZMOT shatters boundaries between prospects, marketers, customers, competitors. Prospects don't proceed neatly, lockstep through a funnel — they zoom in and out, up and down. Forrester published a terrific diagram of these cross-touchpoint customer experiences that reveal the cycles prospects go through — discover, search, research, compare, decide — leveraging the web, mobile, physical stores, call centers, and social media.

Which leads to the fifth, the ZMOT experience now defines brands. What used to be separate — your marketing/advertising, your product/service, your new prospects, your existing customers — is now being mashed together in the ZMOT. Everything intermingles, and from the first touchpoint onward, this whole enchilada is the new customer experience. And its feedback loop, like it or not, defines your brand.

Software to the rescue!

To sum up the impact of the ZMOT on marketing: it's #$@%* complex!

In a recent study IBM did with hundreds of CMOs, 79% of them expect a high or very high level of complexity over the next five years. But only 48% of them feel prepared for that complexity. And I'd bet that at least half of those who think they are prepared are blissfully delusional. Because this world of the ZMOT customer experience is ridiculously complex.

Oh, and it's hard to outsource. At least it's hard to outsource wholesale. Because ultimately, the brand must own the customer experience. ("CX" for those in the know.)

So what do we do? How do we get control of this complexity?

The answer is contained in the problem: digital. Digital has some really wonderful properties. It's measurable. It's scalable. It's malleable, much easier to alter bits than atoms. It's frictionless. It's fast. But most importantly...

It's programmable by software.

And thanks to Moore's Law, cloud computing and SaaS models, open source and expert communities, and a wealth of new languages and frameworks, it's never been easier or faster to build great software. This huge opportunity for disruptive innovation in marketing combined with the fluidity of creating new software has triggered one of the greatest explosions in the history of commercial software: the expansive new field of marketing technology.

A couple of months ago, I took at pass at sketching this marketing technology landscape in an infographic. It's terribly incomplete, with only a representative sample of 250 companies out of the thousands of specialized marketing technology vendors out there. But it gives you a flavor of the incredible scale and scope of marketing software.

Technology for promotion: the whole display advertising ecosystem, search ad management, social media marketing management, mobile marketing, SEO tools. Technology for the customer experience: core website platforms, e-commerce, landing pages and microsites, testing and optimization, video content, email marketing. Technology for the new marketing management: marketing resource management, web analytics, customer analytics, CRM, business intelligence, marketing automation, digital asset management.

My friends, we are in The Golden Age of Marketing Software.

This fountain of innovation is what gives us hope that the complexity of the ZMOT will be conquered. But in harnessing such technology, the nature of marketing shifts. I've written before that you are the software you use. Software is now the interface by which marketing sees and touches the world:

• Analytics shapes our perceptions of our audience
• Automation guides the processes we put in place
• Optimization encourages us to hone tactics in particular ways
• Listening platforms lead us to our choices of social engagements
• Targeting software defines our audience segments
• CRM platforms structure our relationships with customers

Software doesn't just help marketers manage the new customer experience. It increasingly defines the customer experience. If you've ever spent time in a marketing automation platform such as Eloqua, you know what I mean — those flows and rules being arranged are mapping out touchpoints and experiences. It's kind of surreal.

But all this potential wizardry raises a question... who's choreographing this marketing technology ballet in your organization? Or is it more of a mosh pit?

IT vs. Marketing

In the "old days" — you know, a couple of years ago — marketing would simply hand off tech requests to the IT department. It wasn't particularly fast or fun, but it kind of worked on a small scale. But as marketing became more and more overwhelmed with technical needs, the volume and velocity of those requests increased. And the IT/marketing relationship began to feel more and more strained.

It often became a tug of war. IT had its objectives, approaches, and rationale. Marketing often had a different set. It's not that one was right and the other was wrong. But organizationally, IT and marketing became diametrically opposed. This has been the source of more than a few cultural challenges.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research did a survey of marketers and IT professionals, asking them their perceptions of the other department. Marketing's perceptions of IT were:

• IT is the department of "no"
• IT doesn't speak marketing's language
• IT doesn't understand the need for speed
• IT isn't concerned with the customer

A little harsh, maybe. On the other hand, IT's perceptions of marketing boiled down to two:

• Marketing is spin
• Marketers don't care about integration

Even at the CIO and CMO level, where executives in theory should be aligned on the same overarching goals, there's a significant divergence in their priorities: the CIO wants to maintain control of technology costs, minimize and control risk, prove the value of IT; the CMO wants to create the new brand experience, organize for adaptability, prove the value of marketing. How do we reconcile this?

Well, there's always a committee. Just kidding. I actually think the nine most terrifying words in business are, "We're forming a committee, and we're going to decide." Real action is required for four cataclysmic forces reshaping marketing today:

1. The new ZMOT customer and the new customer experience.
2. The marketing technology explosion of this "golden age."
3. The new clockspeed of marketing and its demand for more marketing agility.
4. The new performance culture of marketing and new accountability.

Collectively, these forces demand a fundamental shift in marketing culture, structure, and operations. The foundation of that shift must be this affirmation: marketing must lead its own technology. Marketing is now a technology-powered discipline.

The new marketing technology team

A new kind of marketing professional is emerging in this environment, a technical/marketing hybrid — the marketing technologist.

Marketing technologists are somewhat analogous to creative technologists at agencies, but different. They're less about building stimulus "creative." They're more about building the extended customer experience and the new marketing operations.

They cover a wide swath of technical skills, from wrangling data and analytics, authoring lightweight web features, synchronizing disparate marketing software platforms, SEO, web APIs. They're a cross between an entrepreneurial marketer and an enterprise IT manager — and with pretty good web coding chops. Think of a great technical Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and you've got a pretty good estimate of a marketing technologist.

So where should these marketing technologists live in the organization?

Originally, in the "traditional" org structure, marketing and IT were cleanly split, with marketing sending technical requests to IT. One of the problems with this model, however, was that IT didn't have much perspective or appreciation of marketing; and vice versa, marketing had little perspective or appreciation for technology management. Sometimes this would result in an "estranged" organization, where IT and marketing hardly talked at all.

Today, possibly the greatest mistake is to believe that marketing technology could be split, King Solomon style, with the marketing handled by one team and the technology handled by another. Not a good idea. It misses the very nature of what marketing technology is. Marketing technology is more of a new kind of marketing than a new kind of technology.

Marketing technology needs a team that will provide an integrated, holistic view of its possibilities and operation. A marketing technologist team, a single unit, should both understand good IT practices and understand good marketing practices. Most importantly, they should think natively in the combined domain of marketing technology.

I've studied a number of marketing technology organizational models, and there are four emerging ones that I think do a progressively better job of harnessing the potential here:

• Practice Center — where IT dedicates a specific team to marketing technology, with cross-disciplinary team members who can appreciate marketing's mission. They serve marketing, but they reside in IT and report to the CIO.
• Colocated — where that IT-originated team of marketing technologists are physically colocated in the marketing department, every day collaborating side-by-side with marketers; they work with the CMO, but they still report to the CIO.
• Joint Venture — marketing and IT each contribute staff and resources to a new marketing technology team; it has its own leader who reports jointly to the CIO and the CMO.
• Embedded — in my opinion, the highest evolution is achieved when the marketing technology team resides fully in marketing. It becomes a native part of what marketing is. The team reports to the CMO, but it's still accountable to IT for adhering to the company's broader technology governance. (This is not shadow IT.)

The chief marketing technologist

This marketing technology team should be led by a chief marketing technologist. Or whatever title you prefer, director or VP, of marketing technology, marketing operations, customer intelligence. Maybe marketing CTO? The title is not important, but the role is — and we can define it with five missions.

Mission #1: Build and lead a superb team of marketing technologists. The key here is finding and nurturing the right kind of people with solid tech experience and marketing passion. They should be self-learners (think: constant change) and highly collaborative. The phrase "T-shaped" often applies — strong in a few areas, but versatile in many.

Forrester Research, which recently released a report on Investing in Marketing's Technology Future that recommends setting up a marketing technology office describes the team this way: "Not simply a collection of design-savvy developers. To meet the explosion in channels, devices, and touchpoints, build a team that blends skills in analysis, programming, and user experience."

Mission #2: Help the CMO translate strategy into technology (and vice versa). The CMO doesn't have to be a technologist, but he or she needs a right-hand who is. The chief marketing technology should help drive technical innovation in marketing, work with the CMO to roadmap the intersection of the technology and the business, and determine the necessary investments to make it happen.

Mission #3: Choreograph data and technology across the marketing organization. Select and manage vendors. Integrate and operate marketing technology systems. Interface to agencies. Champion data quality and consistency in marketing. And balance the cost/value trade-off with new technologies.

That last point is crucial. There's a yin-and-yang to good technology management. IT likes to emphasize standardization — for cost and technical stability objectives, that's best. But marketing likes to experiment, keeping the company out in front of the market and new customers. Both poles have benefit (and strong magnetic pull). The marketing technology team must tackle the mission of balancing these two goals, continually cycling between experimenting with new ideas, standardizing the ones the works, and then disrupting them with new experiments as the opportunities arise.

Mission #4: Fuse technology into the DNA of marketing — practices, people, and culture. Marketing technologists, working side-by-side with other marketers, can raise the technology quotient of the entire department, teaching their peers, illuminating the possibilities, providing tech transparency, and cross-pollinating new ideas.

One of these cross-pollinated ideas is adapting the agile development methodology — originally conceived to produce better software in rapid cycles of iteration — for agile marketing. Software developers who are familiar with Scrum and Lean can be a tremendously valuable in helping marketing implements its own agile methodology.

Mission #5: Enforce and inform IT policy and governance for all marketing technology. Just because marketing should control its own technological destiny doesn't mean it's an island in the enterprise. The marketing technology team should take responsibility for security and regulatory compliance of its application — such as adherence to a clear privacy policy — according to IT standards. I think of IT as having a governance role, whereas the marketing technology team has a management role. Where feasible, they should coordinate with IT on sharing common infrastructure. Ideally, the marketing technology team should be a group that the CIO can have confidence in — not be a thorn in his or her side.

In the words of Seth Godin, the chief marketing technologist should be a linchpin. He'd definitely call them weird (in a good way).

No doubt, this is a major transformation for marketing. Forrester's latest report, Three Approaches to the Marketing Technology Office, sums it up nicely though:

"Splintering touchpoints and the growing torrent of data force marketers to build up investments in technology to keep up with customers. To manage and direct the increasingly complex marketing technology stack, Forrester recommends that organizations create a marketing technology office." Marketing technology management and leadership is no longer an option for the marketing department.

Or, consider this metaphor. A marketer is like a skydiver, leaping out into the wide open sky of the market. Marketing technology is the parachute. Who's packing your parachute?

So what does this mean for agencies?

Technology is disrupting numerous facets of the agency world. Some of these disruptions have great potential. Others may bring the sundown of some cherished cash cows.

For instance, advertising automation and optimization will continue to accelerate — although it will increasingly need to integrate with the client more deeply. This is a fascinating area of innovation, computational advertising, but unfortunately, I believe that the value of this service will eventually be eroded by software and network synchronization.

However, creative technology will continue to grow and thrive. New technologies will open new doors, and there will be more and more demand for impactful creative that harnesses them. But these productions will increasingly need to integrate with the client more deeply as well. I believe that the value of creative technology services will actually increase. It's magical work, and it's hard to commoditize without losing the magic. Agencies that have the right teams and process for this will be in high demand.

Even more so, there will be new demand for designing and building other customer experience elements. Think IDEO in the digital sphere. With marketing and customer experience blending, this is a natural evolution for agencies to think more broadly about impacting customers at deeper touchpoints in the ZMOT. It's a powerful opportunity to leverage their creative technology capabilities. But by being part of the customer experience, it inherently must integrate deeply with the client. This can be a very high value service — and it may be necessary to attract and retain clients in that not-too-distant future. You'll be competing with agencies who will embrace this opportunity.

There's a pattern here. Certainly creative technology will be more and more of a core agency asset. But it's not enough. Agencies will need to integrate more deeply with marketing operations and technology on the client side. Meaningful, accurate, secure, real-time data exchange will be the clearest objective. This will require more "marketing technologist" skills within the firm, not just "creative technologist" skills — they're related, but different.

Account managers too must learn to work with more technical stakeholders on the client's team. This will take time, training, and the infusion of some more technical members on to the account team.

But here's the key idea I want to seed into your thinking: a client-side marketing technology team should be your new best friend. Having a technically-capable team on the client's side that is able — and eager — to facilitate the integration of data and systems between the marketing department and your creative technology productions will be priceless. Without them, you're likely to either be woefully constrained in what you can execute, or it will take far more blood, sweat, and tears than you would want to expend.

Smooth integration: profitable. Difficult integration: disastrous.

So my advice is to nurture such fledging marketing technology teams at your clients. Bring them to the table. Get to know them. Help them to achieve early wins with you. Because in the not too distant future, they may be tremendously influential at your review.

Which leads to one more possible business opportunity. With the advantage of perspective across many clients making this transformation, agencies have the potential to become curators of "best practices" for the future of marketing technology. This too can be a high value service — as folks such as IBM, McKinsey, and Forrester know well.

Something to think about.

The popularity contest between digital and TV

Sometimes it feels like the future takes a long time to arrive. While most of you reading this blog have likely been focused on digital marketing as the "hot spot" in marketing for a while, it's always been surprising to me how long it's taken legacy marketing institutions — the classic big agencies of Madison Avenue — to truly embrace that opportunity.

I know, change is hard. Disruptive innovation works this way. But still, in the future... any agency that wants to remain great, must surely embrace digital with genuine creative love. How far off could that future be?

Indeed, the future may finally be here now. The above chart was produced by Strata Marketing, a media data processing giant that services approximately half of all ad agencies in the U.S. A few years ago, they started a survey where they asked agency executives what was their number one medium of choice.

TV had always been in the lead. Real creative was 30-second spots.

But in this quarters' results, the gap between TV and digital narrowed to a single percentage point: 35% still identified TV as the most important medium, but 34% chose digital instead. Maybe that's not earth shattering to us in marketing technology, but in the culture of ad land, that's a revolution.

As a related point on the battleline between TV and digital — at least until the two become one — a story in AdAge earlier this month revealed that growth in jobs in Internet media businesses were skyrocketing (even in the recession), in contrast to shrinking jobs in traditional media:

Again, probably not a huge surprise here. But this is more evidence that the future we've seen coming has truly arrived.

Cool.

The new three-way: CIO, CMO & Agency

Good article on AdAge this morning, Friends With (Digital) Benefits: CMOs Link With CIOs.

The article includes several great anecdotes, from both agencies and brands, talking about the increased frequency of three-way meetings — the CMO, the CIO, and the agency — all collaborating together:

Agencies, especially those involved with digital work, say they're increasingly taking meetings with both the CIO and CMO. Marketers in retail, financial services and media have been among the first to liaise with their technology teams, agencies say, and the result has been more useful customer data and innovative campaigns.

There's also some insightful commentary from Luca Paderni, a leading Forrester analyst focused on marketing leadership. (I'm looking forward to hearing Luca present on this topic at Forrester's CIO-CMO Forum here in Boston this Thursday.)

"At this point," remarks Luca, "Even the marketer that would like to go it alone is realizing the level of complexity and data management is too big to manage alone."

However, there's a hidden logic in this story that I'd like to dig up.

The article recommends CIOs and CMOs work together. Check, couldn't agree more. The article also shows that in that mode, CIOs are becoming "at peace" with having external agencies implement marketing-related tech work. Check, again. This is arguably one of the success drivers of new tech-savvy agencies such as SapientNitro.

If I paraphrase that:

1. IT is providing high-level consulting and governance to marketing missions.

2. People other than IT staff are doing some or all of the actual implementation.

In other words, if IT is comfortable providing advisory and governance services while another group actually implements marketing technology, should it matter whether that other group is a third-party agency or the marketing department itself?

Of course, in all fairness, not all marketing technology is created equal. The more embedded a technology proposes to be in a company's operations — even if it's primarily marketing operations, such as with marketing automation platforms — the more IT might feel that is infringing upon their traditional domain.

So-called "creative technology" — such as an app implemented on Facebook or the iPhone — feels easier to relinquish because IT rarely had that kind of stuff under its control previously.

Still, the lines are blurring, and this open three-way collaboration is an important step in the right direction. It's like watching a genetic algorithm unfold before our eyes, the DNA of marketing and IT entwining and evolving:

While many companies will be hammering out this relationship in the months and years to come, a hybrid exec is already beginning to emerge. Take, for example, Eric Pearson, chief marketing officer for the Americas division of InterContinental Hotels Group. He started out at IHG as senior director-emerging technologies, before moving into e-commerce and then marketing. That kind of cross-pollination — "geeks" heading to the marketing department and vice versa — will be a boon for the C-suite, Mr. Paderni said.

"Technology is becoming critical to marketing," said Mr. Pearson, who has a degree in electrical engineering. "The next generation of CMOs will be a blend."

How ad tech is disrupting the media buying world

The above diagram is from Clay Christensen's web site with the definition of disruptive innovation.

Ari Paparo, a senior VP at Appnexus, had a terrific article published in Ad Age last week, Don't Look Now: Classic Disruption Is Taking Place In Advertising, describing the phenomenon of such disruptive technology on agencies and media buying in digital advertising.

(Thanks to my co-founder at ion, Justin Talerico, for forwarding it to me while he was on vacation.)

Ari's article begins...

Real Time Bidding is the hottest technology in online advertising, and with good reason. By connecting buyers and sellers in real-time, on an impression basis, RTB has enabled an explosion of technology, experimentation, and measurement, resulting in improved results for buyers and yield for sellers. But even with the hype cycle in full force and growth in a hockey-stick patterns, the importance of RTB as a disruptive innovation is largely underestimated.

Clayton Christensen first identified the concept of the disruptive innovation in the Innovator's Dilemma. The basic idea is this: a new technology slowly undermines an existing, dominant technology, by starting out cheaper and "worse," then slowly improving until it is a full replacement for the dominant one, but with newer, more flexible capabilities, and usually a lower cost basis. Classic examples of disruptive technologies include the PC (which disrupted mainframes and minicomputers) and desktop publishing (which disrupted the print industry).

He goes on to explain that so-called ad exchange technologies were originally such a low-end innovation, considered worse than traditional display buying by interactive agencies. But as these exchanges started to grow — what he labels the second phase of ad exchanges — "RTB-powered buying and selling grew like weeds, rapidly displacing most non-RTB, and simultaneously exchange buying displaced a significant portion of direct remnant sales to ad networks."

"But even today," he notes, "the consensus remains that RTB is a great remnant technology, and will never seriously challenge the world of three-martini lunches, faxed IOs, relationships and homepage takeovers. Simply put, it remains 'worse' than the incumbent ways of doing business."

I highly recommend that every marketing technologist read his entire article — both for the story playing out in online advertising, but also as an allegory of other disruptive innovation in marketing.

"The fact that RTB is quickly taking over remnant inventory is, in fact, the first step in a major disruption to the entire online display ecosystem," he concludes. "The new technology stack will replace, in full, the current way of doing things, and sooner than many may expect.

As a companion piece to Ari's article, consider this post I wrote a while ago on disruptive innovation in advertising creative.

I made the case that online display advertising had started to disrupt the high-end creative of traditional advertising... and in turn, it was disrupted by even less creative search advertising... which itself has been disrupted by the almost total absence of advertiser-produced "creative" in social media marketing.

Interesting to think of the intersection of these two trends.

Should agencies show more -aaS?

First there was SaaS — software-as-a-service.

Then PaaS — platform-as-a-service.

Then IaaS — infrastructure-as-a-service.

These days it's EaaS — everything-as-a-service. Development-as-a-serivce (DaaS). Testing-as-a-service (TaaS). Content-as-a-service (CaaS). Social-media-as-a-service (SMaaS). I'm not making these up.

Is it AaaS — anything-as-a-service? Is the right adjective for that AaaS-inine?

Which made we wonder...

Should agencies simply rebrand themselves as MaaS — marketing-as-a-service?

"We're not mass marketing. We're MaaS marketing." (A homage to homonyms.)

They'd better hurry. One of their competitors, the digital agency space150, already has the jump on space-advertising-as-a-service (SAaaS).

There's a serious question in here somewhere, but I'll save that for another day.

Creative technology != marketing technology

Just read an article posted on Adweek yesterday, The New Tech Heads, profiling four "digital technologists" — that label seems a tad redundant, doesn't it? — from top agencies:

• Scott Prindle, executive creative technology director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
• Chris Kief, creative technology director, TBWA\Chiat\Day
• Richard Schatzberger, director of creative technology, Bartle Bogle Hegarty
• Gareth Kay, director of digital strategy, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

I'm thrilled to see this coverage. The integration of technology into the marketing world has been largely ad hoc to date, usually without consistent executive leadership. Establishing senior management roles for creative technologists is an important step in reconfiguring the DNA of new marketing organizations.

Congratulations to Scott, Chris, Richard, and Gareth on leading the charge. (By the way, Gareth has a great blog, brand new, that's worth checking out.)

However, reflecting on this article — and exploring the web sites of these agencies looking to learn more — it struck me that the mission of a creative technologist may be quite different than a marketing technologist.

The role of the creative technologist — as the title implies — seems to be primarily about (a) using leading edge technology to execute creative campaigns and (b) finding inspiration for new creative campaigns from the leading edge of technology. The focus is on creative campaigns either way, which is an evolution — but not a revolution — of what agencies have provided for decades.

Now, I believe there is a genuine need for such creative productions — and always will be — and therefore there's a place for such creative technologists who can lead and enable them.

But I wonder if the emphasis on creative technology has caused a number of these agencies to overlook the larger vision of marketing technology.

Marketing technology isn't just about creative productions. It's about changing the very operational architecture by which marketers run their organizations and build relationships with customers, prospects, partners, vendors, collaborators.

Creative technology projects are a subset of this new marketing technology universe. But there's a need for a broader management vision that synthesizes such creative technology with overall social media marketing, search marketing, web site and post-click marketing, email marketing, marketing automation, cross-channel management, marketing analytics, marketing resource management, and so on.

Granted, these broader marketing technology responsibilities probably fall under the domain of the CMO of a company more than an agency. But agencies should be deft and nimble at interfacing to their clients at that level, if for no other reason than to make sure that the benefits of their brilliant creative technology productions are fully captured.

I can't help thinking that agencies have an opportunity to lead this integrative vision — and that it is a revolutionary shift in marketing. But to accomplish that, they need to integrate such marketing technology into their own operations first.

Not to pick on anyone, but...

When writing this post, I did a Google search for each of the people featured in the Adweek article. As an example, I did a search for "gareth kay goodby silverstein" — figuring I might learn more about him on a profile page on their site — only to be shocked to discover no links to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in the first three pages of results from Google. I gave up before going to page four.

Puzzled by that, I went to the Goodby Silverstein web site, which launches a visually stunning Flash experience. There was a Staff menu option, so I clicked it and came to a beautiful mosaic of about 100 faces that you could roll over each one to see their name and title. I hunted around for Gareth, but never did find him. I can kind of link you to the page, but it's actually deep in a Flash — so you have to get routed through their official opening.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, it's a gorgeous site.

But from a functional marketing perspective, the closing off of Google as a channel — and really all link-oriented social media venues — seems like a dubious marketing technology decision.

Maybe some would argue that such sacrifices are sometimes necessary in the interest of developing the most creative production. It doesn't have to index in Google, it just has to be gorgeous. Maybe that's true.

But I'm not convinced that we're anywhere near the Pareto frontier of having to trade off creativity and functionality. I think we can have both — although it will require creative and functional forces to collaborate even more tightly, beyond the scope of any one creative project.

Appoint a marketing technology czar

Avi Dan has a great article that was published yesterday in Advertising Age, Why Brands Should Embrace Technological Change.

It's an excellent piece talking about the rapid shifts in marketing technology and encouraging CMOs to embrace the phenomenon with all their heart (and all their organizational structure).

I was pleased to see him advocate for a chief marketing technologist role that would report to the CMO:

CMOs must lead a number of internal changes as well. The first is to recognize that technology is no less a marketing tool than, say, market research, and appoint a "marketing-technology czar" to champion it. That person's responsibility will be to act as a cross-functional facilitator and identify technology that can enhance marketing activity and brand building."

I prefer the chief marketing technologist title, but "czar" has a nice ring to it too.

I love Avi's closing remarks: "To navigate through the added complexity of the technological eruption, they have to go beyond just tolerating it to become active participants and advocates of the new marketing ecosystem."

"They ought to embrace the speed of change and view it as a brand asset."

(My enthusiastic emphasis added.)

Creative technologists in brand advertising

I recently read an excellent post by Randall Rothenberg on the IAB blog, A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising. It's a passionate argument for a renaissance of creativity in interactive advertising — especially in the agency world.

Randall decries that online advertising, while pervasive, is rarely iconic. How many people have felt good about search ads or banners? In contrast to the great campaigns of TV and print, which have deeply affected people and culture — the ideals of brand advertising.

He blames this absence of "fantastic, emotionally resonant, culturally significant and successful interactive advertising campaigns" on four enemies of online branding:

• a direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands;
• an interactive agency business model that disincentivizes greatness and fails to penalize mediocrity;
• an unwillingness by mainstream agencies to integrate technologists as full partners in the advertising creative team;
• media industry values and habits that malign and depreciate its own products, and by extension its customers';

The entire article is insightful, but his articulation of the need for creative technologists as an integral part of the core creative team in major advertising agencies caught my attention the most.

Randall unabashedly declares that the creative technologist must be the third member of the new creative partnership that for the past 60 years has existed between the art director and the copywriter. He quotes RG/A's Chariman, CEO, and Global Chief Creative Officer Bob Greenberg:

"There are critical creative needs that didn't exist in the old advertising," says Mr. Greenberg, who counts 130 technologists in his New York office. "Advertising is no longer just about the display ad or the TV commercial or the banner; it's about creating meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Our technology group, they can keep up to speed technically with the top people at HP or IBM. But they also understand how to work with others to create an application that will lead to community." [Emphasis added.]

Mr. Greenberg stresses that calling the creative technologist the "third member" of the creative team is, at best, metaphorical. There are several new skill sets creative agencies today must possess to attract, engage, and influence consumers — Flash video development, software design, information architecture, animation, CRM, iPhone app design, and ActionScript development among them — and no one individual will have expertise in all. The point is that the men and women with these skills must be treated as full partners in the campaign development process, contributors to "the Big Idea," not as executional afterthoughts buried in the basement. [Emphasis added again.]

I find this exciting at two levels.

First, the elevation of technology talent in the agency world represents a tremendous opportunity for agencies — who need to address the disruptive innovation of online advertising with bold changes — as well as opening new career paths for technical professionals, especially those who blend engineering disciplines with creative and marketing business savvy. Marketing and computer science together in the spotlight.

Secondly, the agency world influences corporate marketing departments. The visibility of technologists as part of the creative marketing team will help speed the establishment of marketing technology teams — including senior marketing technology leadership — inside the marketing department, beyond the constraints of the traditional IT organization.

Cheers to the IAB for championing this discussion!