In his post Rise of the Marketing Technologist (http://www.chiefmartec.com/2010/04/rise-of-the-marketing-technologist.html), Scott Brinker makes a number of great points that speak directly to my current occupation (all quotes are attributed to Scott’s article).
“...in the big picture of marketing, the real challenge isn't the individual components — it's how these different pieces fit together in your unique enterprise.”
Exactly so! All business activity can be broken down into discrete activities. The challenge is how to orchestrate these activities into a marketing symphony. Some might argue that a great marketer is an individual who can envision marketing strategy, devise programs to attain marketing objectives, execute campaigns that engage the audience and achieve a set number of goals in a measureable fashion. It is the rare marketer who also possesses technology skills.
Scott states that technology choices “open (or close) the door to synergies with your other technology choices.”
Argument for a Marketing Technologist is that a good knowledge of technology is important to a CMO. This is because technological choices have a long tail. They will be in effect a long time and will eventually become a legacy system or a candidate for replacement. As I.T. is responsible for system maintenance and integration issues, both present and future, they are rightly concerned and therefore somewhat rigid in their adoption of new technology. Bad technological choices can create geometric increases in maintenance costs. For this reason new technology must be vetted by I.T. before it can be adopted. This can create significant delays for marketers, marketers who need flexibility and speed to market in order to capitalize on market opportunities.
Marketing and I.T. can often seem at odds with each other. This is primarily due, in my opinion, to a lack of understanding of the requirements of the two disciplines (reliability and costs vs. speed and agility). When there is some understanding, there is often an insufficient depth to properly assess the business impact of current choices vs. speed to market.
“Marketing must take ownership of the technology in its domain.”
Scott refers to the need for a “marketing-technology czar” because “technology becomes one of the vertical pillars of the marketing function”. Whereas I agree with the last of these points, the need to understand the technology is no longer a major issue. I say this because of my own workday reality. I work with a tool that removes to a large extent my concern with technology integration and maintenance issues. My focus is on implementing marketing programs quickly and inexpensively by leveraging whatever marketing technology is readily available to the marketer.
“A CMO doesn't need to have been a Chief Creative Officer, but he or she must know how to manage and lead such resources.”
As Scott points out so succinctly, you just need to connect the dots. I spend my time with marketers asking them what they want to do, how they want to do it, and where is the information coming from. The tool I use allows me to easily connect all the dots, that is to say deal with any customer events and actions. All I do is receive data from a web form, a database, a spreadsheet, an XML ticket or whatever. I don’t really care because all I need to know is that when my marketing scenario receives this data we agree on the name of the event and the fields that will be received.
Once I receive the data all I need to do is execute what the marketer asked me to do, perhaps add the email to the database and send the contact a personalized barcoded coupon. To take these two actions I just have to select a list of actions for the applications the marketer wants to use, say Salesforce and ConstantContact.
I don’t worry about how the technology works. I do not need to master either web forms, Salesforce or ConstantContact. I just need to define the marketing rules and build scenarios such as acquisition, loyalty, reactivation to name just a few. My current reality is that I am usually waiting for the agency to deliver the Creatives. This is a real change from my old life when the client was always waiting on technology.
The freedom that my current design and implementation tool provides me means that marketers are now free to “wield technology as a strategic marketing capability.” I would go further and say to wield emerging apps and digital media as a strategic marketing capability.
It also means that the time to market for a marketing opportunity is now drastically reduced. Unless resources need to be trained in a new technology it is now possible to implement marketing campaigns as quickly as you can generate the content and visuals.
This simple customer state diagram demonstrates what I am talking about. It’s a scenario that governs a loyalty program that makes use of NetSuite and an email marketing system. No programming needed, just Creatives!
