Gartner recently released its report on IT predictions for 2012. The subhead of their press release boldly calls out their most stunning conclusion: predictions show IT budgets are moving out of the control of IT departments.
Garner predicts that by 2015, 35% of enterprise IT expenditures will be managed outside of the IT department's budget. Let that sink in for a moment.
"The continued trend toward consumerization and cloud computing highlight the movement of certain former IT responsibilities into the hands of others," said Daryl Plummer, managing VP and Gartner fellow. "As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years."
The Gartner announcement includes this brief analysis with their prediction (emphasis is mine):
Next generation digital enterprises are being driven by a new wave of business managers and individual employees who no longer need technology to be contextualized for them by an IT department. These people are demanding control over the IT expenditure required to evolve the organization within the confines of their roles and responsibilities. CIOs will see some of their current budget simply reallocated to other areas of the business. In other cases, IT projects will be redefined as business projects with line-of-business managers in control.
This proclamation has naturally stirred up much commentary in the IT community — great articles on Wired (2012 Will Be the Year of Apocalyptic Reckoning for CIOs) and ZDNet (Line-of-business tech budgets may soon top IT department budgets) — focused on how the IT department can evolve to become more of a broker of services and a coordinator of distributed activities. "The IT organization of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT," said Plummer.
Big changes for IT and CIOs ahead. But consider the other side of this equation — where the money and responsibility are migrating to. As Plummer remarked in an accompanying audio interview, "CMOs, or chief marketing officers, may end up having larger IT budgets than CIOs."
Every CMO should be asking themselves if they're ready to inherit this mantle of marketing IT leadership.
A good place to start would be examining Forrester's recommendation from earlier this year to establish an office of marketing technology. And if you don't already have a good intuition for the staff who will make up this new technology-in-marketing function, here's a write-up on the marketing technologist revolution (and a video presentation of it as well).
I've shared the laws of technology for marketers. But what about laws of marketing for technologists?
The single most insightful marketing book I've ever read was published nearly 20 years ago, before the Web was anything more than an academic experiment: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Marketers of the Internet Generation can be forgiven if they haven't read it. After all, it doesn't invent entirely new tactical dynamics of online marketing, such as Permission Marketing, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, and Content Rules have. But the strategic truths that it reveals are timeless.
A few of the laws are:
The Law of Leadership
It's better to be first than it is to be "better" — the leading brand in almost any category is the one that embedded itself first in the neural pathways of its prospects. In the best cases, the name may even become generic: Kleenex. Coke. FedEx. Or, a more contemporary example, Google. (A subsequent Law of the Mind notes, "Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first.")
The Law of the Category
If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in. "Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what's new."
The Law of Focus
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind. "The most effective words are simple and benefit oriented. No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it's always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four." Overnight = FedEx. Safety = Volvo. Cola = Coke.
The Law of Attributes
For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute. If you're not the leader in your market, it's futile to try to own their word. "It's much better to search for an opposite attribute that will allow you to play off against the leader. The key word here is opposite — similar won't do.
I'd list the other 18 — they're all great — but it would border on copyright infringement.
I've seen several blog posts by digital marketing gurus who claim those "laws" no longer apply. I'd like to push back on that.
Admittedly, it's easy to poke holes in something written 20 years ago. There are numerous examples in the book that time has worn away — e.g., IBM for being the leader in computers, even though "computer" today is arguably owned by Dell and IBM has moved on to "technology consulting." Atari used to own "video games." Today it's owned by Sony with Playstation. [Edit: Jim Ewel in the comments below points out that HP and Lenovo may have claim to "computer" by sheer volume, and that Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox are on top of "video games" today. Which leads to my next point...]
But nothing lasts forever. The laws of marketing that are focused on owning a particular word aren't a guarantee of eternal permanence. But within the scope of a reasonable competitive battlefield — 5 years, 10 years, maybe more — it's absolutely the benchmark of victory. And while some of the victors from yesteryear have gone away, many others have persisted (e.g., Hertz for car rentals), and still others (e.g., Apple) have evolved to own entirely new categories.
Google owns "search." Facebook owns "social network." It's one of the reasons why Twitter is trying to position itself as something other than a social network. People say that Yahoo! used to own search, but truthfully, they owned "Internet directory." And, unfortunately, Internet directories ended up being a temporary blip in the history of the Web.
(Yahoo! now seems to want to own "display advertising" — but that's not a value proposition for users.)
Another law, The Law of Exclusivity — two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect's mind — is one of the reasons Google is struggling so much with its social networking attempts. Its best bet, which they seem to be pursuing, is to play up social dynamics as a part of "search," the word they do own. But they've got their work cut out for them.
Bing has been desperately trying to compete for "search" — they even tried to own the word "decide," but it seems that consumers today are more interested in searching than deciding. (It's no good owning a word if prospects don't latch on to it.) Microsoft has spent a fortune on trying to dislodge the equation of "search" with Google in people's minds. It's nearly impossible to do.
I acknowledge that the Law of Leadership can be hard to perceive in the early stage of technological innovation — there are many examples of the first entrant to a market losing out to someone else shortly thereafter. But to reiterate Ries' & Trout's main point: being first in the market isn't as important as being first in the mind. The Altair was the first home computer, but the Apple II ended up owning that space by being the first in more people's minds. (Shortly afterwards, IBM owned the "PC" in people's minds — a personal computer that was more serious than a mere home computer.)
So, even though Apple wasn't the first MP3 player, Google wasn't the first search engine, and Facebook wasn't the first social network, in the rapid evolution of new technology — whole new markets emerging from the ether — those companies ended up grabbing the leadership positions after a little early stage jostling. And they're now darn hard to dislodge.
(Another law, The Law of the Opposite — number two players in a market need to turn the leader's strength into a weakness — is at play in how Android is being positioned as "open" vs. the iPhone's "closed" product philosophy.)
Some may argue that this philosophy of owning words, mindshare, and leadership positions was more feasible in the age of mass media. Once you picked your "word," with enough money, you could hammer it into people's brains with TV ads on all three channels — ABC, NBC, CBS. In our current age of infinitely fragmenting media, that option is going away.
But don't confuse the phenomenon of leadership positioning with its distribution.
Businesses that succeed must still own a well-defined position in people's minds. It's just that they're winning those positions through different tactics and channels — meaningful content marketing, targeted search marketing, consistent word-of-mouth in social media. Advertising still plays an important role, but its dynamics and ecosystem are radically different than 20 years ago — you can't dominate all media, but you can laser target specific media to specific audiences.
When I saw Seth Godin speak a few weeks ago, he emphasized the incredible potential of entrepreneurial thinking, how "linchpins" can change the world in narrow markets in ways that the big giants can't. Some might interpret that as another death knell for these old-school marketing laws, but I view it as more of a powerful shift in scale.
You still want to own a word in a prospect's mind. But now, instead of blanketing an entire mass audience — an option that was never available to smaller businesses or more niche markets — you can focus on owning a very specific word for a very specific audience segment. For instance, a small but brilliant team may own "UX design" in the minds of the Boston software start-up community. That can be a highly valuable position.
Larger businesses may own a collection of related-but-different words for related-but-different audience segments. (Starting to sound like an AdWords portfolio strategy? That's no coincidence.)
For another contemporary example, read venture capitalist Scott Maxwell's post from just yesterday, The Easiest Way to Fail in Business: Lack of Market Clarity, and you will see the essence of Ries' & Trout's laws peeking through.
Anyway, if you're a technologist and you want to grok the underlying gestalt of marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing should be on the top of your reading list. You'll have to provide your own interpretation for our digital landscape, but I think you'll be amazed at how the core concepts are as applicable to modern marketing as they ever were.
P.S. Totally wacky side note. I was flipping through my old copy of the book to select a few excerpts, and I happened to notice this endorsement (written in 1993):
"Powerful marketing concepts with practical evidence galore! These concepts are especially relevant to current economic and competitive conditions." – Herman Cain, President and CEO, Godfather's Pizza
Well, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover. ;-)
Last week, I spoke at Adobe's Enterprise Partner Community Day in NYC on the Rise of the Marketing Technologist (and What It Means for Agencies). Adobe has now posted the video of that session — click the image below to open a full window and see the video and slides synchronized:
The event was a mix of presentations by Adobe representatives on their particular technologies and partner programs and a few presentations by "external" speakers, such as myself — and Seth Godin (!!). I've been a fan of Seth's writing for years, but this was the first time I heard him speak. To hear him speak at an event called "Rise of the Marketing Technologist" and then give my presentation was kind of cool.
Seth's presentation was drawn from themes discussed in his most recent books, Linchpin and We Are All Weird. He was a firehose of insights — starting by admonishing the audience of agency executives that the advertising world as they knew it (repetitive ads on broad reach media) was dead, even if it was still walking in zombie mode at the moment. Good morning, and welcome to the end of the world!
Three other remarks he made that stuck with me:
Under capitalism, real wealth has always gone to those who own the means of production. The factory worker or the coal miner never got rich, but the factory owner and the mine owner did. It was very expensive to build or buy a means of production. But today, the means of production is the laptop. It can be claimed by anyone who has the courage to decide to become an "owner" of your own production, rather than just a worker in somebody else's machine.
The main point of We Are All Weird is that the normal bell curve, which has dominated the economics of product development for centuries — selling average products to the bulk of average consumers — is being destroyed by the new explosive wealth of choice enabled by the Internet. So-called Long Tail dynamics are invading more and more industries and markets. This is the underlying force that is changing the nature of marketing, because the way you reach and engage those "tribes" out on the edge of the curve — and for larger organizations, how you achieve that at scale — it is very different than the repetitive ads on broad reach media approach. (It's more than just repetitive ads on narrow reach media too.)
Finally, he said at one point, "Every time I listen to the lizard brain and do the exact opposite of what makes it feel safe and comfortable, the more remarkable I become." And being remarkable, with your own means of production, serving unique submarkets in the Long Tail that deeply appreciate what makes you remarkable, is the key to prosperity in this new world.
P.S. For some added ambiance, the event was held at the Hudson Theater on Broadway. The video above never pans out, but the presentations were given on the stage — the first ever Broadway performance of The Book of Marketing Technology. ;-) The photo below is a view of the theater, where performers such as Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, and Barbara Streisand all appeared.
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:
And here's an essay version of my talk:
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.
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.
"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:
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.
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:
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?
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:
A little harsh, maybe. On the other hand, IT's perceptions of marketing boiled down to two:
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
"Marketing must control its own technological destiny."
Not too long ago, that was a radical proposition. (In some IT quarters, it might still be.)
But today, the esteemed enterprise analysts at Forrester released two new reports that take that proposition mainstream: Investing In Marketing's Technology Future and Three Approaches To The Marketing Technology Office. $499 each, but worth it for executive-level discussions.
To give you a flavor of the first report, and why it has me dancing in my chair, consider these first few subheads in the document:
Yes! Yes! And yes!!
There's another subhead later — turning technology into a touchstone for creativity — that I love almost as much.
Forrester's recommendation is to establish a marketing technology office that reports to the CMO (or the VP of customer intelligence, if such a role exists in your organization, who then reports to the CMO). There's dotted line accountability to the CIO too — this is not shadow IT, it's shining in the light of day.
Their proposed org structure looks like this:
An excerpt of their raison d'être for this new structure:
"For marketing to build a technology strategy, implement and develop those technologies, and better integrate and act on the customer data it captures, marketing resources must be organized within a central framework that can act at the speed that marketing requires. We call this framework the marketing technology office (MTO), defined as: A center of excellence that leads technology strategy, develops marketing technologies, and evangelizes innovative uses throughout the marketing department."
Well said!
My only beef with the report is that it suggests the person running the marketing technology office should have the title of "chief marketing technology strategist." That's a mouthful — just feels like one word too many. How about "chief marketing technologist" instead? ;-)
The good news is that, at last, everyone agrees:
The challenge, however, is that beyond those two principles, there is a stunning diversity of opinions for how marketing technology should be managed and exactly what the new collaboration between marketing and IT should look like. I've heard from many different companies that are addressing this in very different ways.
At this stage, I actually think that's fine. Different organizational structures should reflect different strategies and cultures — and often the individual leaders at the helm. What works great for one company might be a train wreck in another. What's important, however, is that there is clear governance driving the choices in each particular company.
Are you consciously making your marketing-IT organizational decisions? Or do they just happen by "accident?" Of course, it helps to know what your choices are. With that in mind, I thought I'd try to assemble a list of the different marketing technology organizational models that I've encountered:
Here are brief descriptions of these models:
| Model | Description |
| Traditional | Marketing makes requests to IT, IT implements and manages overall technology strategy; funded via chargebacks to marketing and primary IT budget. Overall cycle speed usually slowed with overhead, differing priorities. Marketing unlikely to develop much technical savvy in this structure. |
| Committee | IT and marketing leaders, often including the CIO and CMO, participate in a committee to make joint decisions about marketing technology investments and governance. Usually IT handles implementation. Committees are rarely "agile," but may provide good guidance. Committee members may become fluent in marketing-technology synergy. |
| Co-located | An IT team is dedicated to marketing technology and is physically co-located with the marketing team. Day-to-day execution is done collaboratively with marketing staff, but IT group still reports primarily to IT management (maybe dotted line to CMO). Helps exchange marketing and tech savvy across both departments. |
| Liaison | Similar to Committee structure, but an individual person provides coordination between IT and marketing, reporting jointly to CMO and CIO. Can be more agile. Role may be "Chief Marketing Technologist." IT still handles most implementation, although outside vendors may be arranged by the liaison. |
| Embedded | A dedicated marketing technology team based in the marketing department — but unlike Co-located, reports to (and funded by) the CMO, not the CIO. Led by a Chief Marketing Technologist. Should still adhere to IT governance, may have dotted line accountability to CIO. May wear "marketing operations" label. Marketing becomes very tech savvy. |
| Direct Report | The IT department directly reports to the CMO. I've heard of a case of this with a major retailer. May work if marketing charter is broad enough to address the total customer experience. Seems tricky for non-marketing IT responsibilities. |
| Independent | An independent marketing technology team is assembled that lives outside of the traditional marketing and IT departments, although its chief reports to both the CIO and the CMO. Independence may enable agility, but possibly at the expense of alignment with the core departments from which it came. |
| Outsourced (Mktg) | The majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to one or more third-party vendors, but primarily under the direction of the CMO. Sidesteps as much IT implementation as possible with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and standardized APIs and data formats. Alignment concerns if third-parties are too strong relative to marketing's own technical savvy. |
| Joint Venture | IT and marketing both contribute staff and resources to a joint "marketing technology" team, but the participants remain rooted in their origin department (unlike Independent). Can be quite agile and can cross-pollinate tech and marketing savvy across both departments. Requires good CIO-CMO synergy to work well. |
| Outsourced (IT) | Again, the majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to a third-party — but in this model, that's done primarily under the leadership of the CIO. May be a different set of vendors than when outsourced from the marketing department. Runs the risk of diverging from core marketing vision. |
| Practice Center | IT creates a marketing technology "practice center" within its department to specialize in the growing tech needs of the marketing department. Possibly a dotted line report to the CMO. Can be quite agile. With the right dedicated hires and good communication with marketing can be a very marketing-savvy IT team. |
| Outsourced Triangle | Significant portions of marketing technology strategy and implementation are outsourced, but the outsourcing is jointly led by the CIO and the CMO. Requires good synergy between CIO and CMO to work. Growing number of agencies adept at this structure. Runs risk of not having marketing technology as an in-house core competency. |
| Hostile | The IT department and the marketing department are at best not speaking, at worst engaged in intracompany warfare. This is not a model anyone would want to adopt, but unfortunately it does accurately describe the state of some organizations. This is a terminal disease if it isn't cured. |
| Merged | Some visionaries have suggested that IT and marketing should fully merge, more integrated than a Joint Venture or a Direct Report relationship. Loses independent IT governance. Mini-mergers with other departments, an IT diaspora? Viability depends on post-merger internal structure. |
Which organizational structure is right for your company? It depends.
Generally, I think that most companies should develop marketing technology competency internally — even if they choose to outsource certain pieces — and that marketing needs to become more technically savvy in order to properly lead the vision of customer experience and brand development in a digital world.
Many of the above models can accomplish those goals, although I think Embedded, Joint Venture, and Co-located (or Merged, if you believe that's feasible) address those objectives better than the other configurations.
What do you think? What model is being used at your company? Are there other organizational structures that I should add to this list?
We were in New York this weekend, and we walked by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue. A large crowd of people had gathered around an impromptu memorial to Steve Jobs — made of post-it notes, messages on MacBook and iPad boxes, printouts of "Think Different" ads, flowers, apples.
I found it touching and inspiring:
A series of post-it notes spelled out this famous Apple advertisement:
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
It's a ridiculously high bar that Steve Jobs set, but there's a calling here:
What will you do with your life — and this applies to marketing and product development as much as anything — to touch and inspire the world around you?
I'm Scott Brinker, a marketing technologist with 
