Marketing tech and the evolution of hybrid roles

Marketing now a growth-driving engine

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Traditionally, the marketing function was seen as the creative function focused on developing, building and executing campaigns to build brand awareness. Increasingly, thanks to direct feedback from customers, marketing campaigns can be fine-tuned and adapted, virtually in real time.
For the first time, we can start to really understand the impact that marketing has on the business, rather than using fuzzy metrics like reach and frequency.

Thanks to technology, marketing performance can be measured and benchmarked to capture the impact on top and bottom line growth. Increasingly, the marketing function, underpinned by technology, has become an engine to drive growth and tangible return on investment.
This shift in emphasis is creating new roles and responsibilities within the marketing function, which have a wider impact on established organisation structures.

Technology, often referred to as 'digital', is no longer a vertical function controlled by IT. Rather, it is a horizontal function which impacts on every function within an organisation.

As a result, the marketing function has become a hybrid model of creativity and technology with new roles being created to exploit the opportunities afforded by technology. These include:

• Strategy – a move away from tactical deployment of a sales strategy to a central strategic function has seen a wave of new job titles including chief customer officer, chief digital officer, chief customer experience officer
• Analysis – from the rich sources of data available, there has been an increase in the need and demand for data scientists and statisticians to analyse and derive insights to inform and drive marketing strategy. Titles associated include chief data scientist, consumer insights director, eCRM director
• Technology – marketing now owns and operates its own “technology stack” to identify the right platforms and software products to build a coherent architecture to best serve the customer. New titles include chief marketing technologist and, in start-ups, growth hacker

As in any organisation or function undergoing change, there are tensions and striving to keep a balance between left and right brain thinking is not easy.

The integration of technology and creativity is finely nuanced. Relying too much on data, which is historic and helps make sense of the past, is dangerous and can impede on creative thinking and sometimes plain common sense.

Given the speed of change in terms of new channels, customer behaviour and technologies, historical data can quickly become outdated. Agile marketing teams comprising creative and technical people with complementary skills and experience with a unifying customer-first mind-set will be successful.
In summary, combining creativity and marketing is the way we do marketing now. The bottom line is that the guiding principle of marketing in the 21st century is a combination of art and creativity augmented by code and data with 100% focus on the customer.

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The Agile Marketing Organization

Marketers know that digital channels are critical to engaging today’s consumer. Global spending on digital advertising will reach $178 billion in 2016, almost 30 percent of total ad spending, according to eMarketer. Digital advertising already represents a third of all ad spending in the U.S. today, and many forecasts see digital reaching parity with TV in a few years’ time. In the UK, almost 60 percent of consumers use social media each week for an average of 52 minutes per day. In Germany, about 13 percent of all commerce is now transacted online or via mobile devices; online sales are growing at more than 20 percent a year. Worldwide, a quarter of consumers use smartphones, a percentage that will rise to a third, or some 2.5 billion people, by 2018. In developed economies, of course, the percentages are much higher.

Marketing organizations are feeling the pressure created by these shifts. And while still important, traditional skills such as creativity and brand building no longer suffice in a digital-first reality. Marketing has become much more of a science requiring technical, data-crunching abilities. With new digital channels and tools constantly emerging, marketing organizations must become more agile—to borrow a term from the world of software development—iterating much more quickly in order to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

To increase their agility, chief marketing officers (CMOs) require very different capabilities and structures than were needed in the past. Capabilities include new talent in agile development, big data for consumer understanding, programmatic buying, and branded content, as well as redefined roles for existing talent in areas such as marketing effectiveness analytics, marketing innovation, and agency management. At the same time, organizations must consciously build structures that align with their key business objectives. Organizations that aren’t able to build these capabilities and structures over the next year will, we believe, fall behind their competitors.

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