Chief Marketing Technologist

3-minute interview: why marketing technologists now

2012-02-03T06:50:07-05:00

Bertil Snel, who arranged for me to present on the marketing technologist role at last year's Adobe Partner Day, just posted a follow-up — the marketer of the future is a "techy" — including a post-event video interview we did backstage.

His post is in Dutch, but thanks to the miracle of Google Translate, I'm pretty sure that he's not making fun of my exaggerated hand waving. But judge for yourself. Here's the 3-minute "short version" of the marketing technologist pitch:

Marketing as an object-oriented program?

2012-02-02T07:16:29-05:00

I ran across an inspiring blog post this week by Jacques Spilka of Whatsnexx, titled Complexity killed marketing automation! (The if-it-bleeds-it-leads school of blog post headlines.)

Jacques made two insightful points:

1. Marketing automation programming can get complicated fast

First, he cut right to the quick of the challenge of marketing automation: for marketing automation to be really effective, it needs to be wielded by the marketer, not by the marketing automation expert.

Most marketing automation packages require fairly extensive setup and configuration, frequently done by high-priced consultants. (It's no accident of strategy that IBM, arguably primarily a technology services company, acquired enterprise marketing software provider Unica.)

"The purpose of automation is to simplify and speed up processes — not complicate things!" writes Jacques. But as marketing automation providers continually add new and disparate features, such as merging in more social media capabilities, the "automated" solution can unintentionally become more complicated to wield than the processes that you originally wanted to automate in the first place.

This complexity can dampen the actual adoption of automation — even if a company has installed an amazing marketing automation platform, they may only be leveraging a small sliver of its capabilities.

Of course, Whatsnexx offers its own marketing automation solution that proposes to address this challenge, so Jacques does have an ulterior motive for making this point. But the statement of the problem they're trying to solve rings true.

2. If marketing is being programmed, can we use an object-oriented paradigm?

Jacques describes their solution as customer state marketing. (Akin Arikan did a nice post on them last year.) If you have some software engineering background, your synapses may already be firing associations with state machines, and that seems to be part of Whatsnexx's intention.

According to Jacques, the key benefits of their approach are:

Scenarios display the characteristics of object-oriented programming
Scenario programming is procedural

Whoa. Let me do a double take.

We're reading a blog by a marketing solutions provider — selling to marketers — that is touting the characteristics of object-oriented programming as one of the benefits it provides customers. That's pretty bold. I mean, I just recently wrote that marketers should learn how to program, but to have a marketing technology company trying to sell a "better" programming paradigm to marketers is kind of striking.

Yet it resonated with me instantly. (And apparently with Akin too.)

To quote a bit from Jacques's post:

For programmers, [the above two benefits] are significant. For everyone else this sounds like some foreign language — definitely very obscure. Let me put it another way:

1) Scenarios are self-contained. They know how to behave in response to external stimulus (i.e., an event). This stimulus occurs randomly, and the scenarios will automatically respond to the event according to the rules contained in the scenario itself. The scenario only knows what it needs to know in order to respond to the stimulus, and contains all of the information necessary in order to carry out its functions properly (i.e., actions), such as sending the appropriate email.

2) Scenarios follow simple rules, and have a simple program flow and limited branching options. This makes it easy to design state-based event/action program flows that govern how and when a scenario responds to a random customer event.

If that's not pitching to a new generation of marketers — and marketing technologists — I don't know what is.

Even if the net functionality that Whatsnexx delivers is similar to traditional marketing automation systems, the power of a paradigm can't be denied.

Thinking about the modern marketing function as a large-scale object-oriented program stirs the imagination — at least it does for me — and suggests a number of intriguing new ways to organize and coordinate the multitude of moving parts in marketing's environment.

Just as object-oriented programming dramatically changed the development of software — without directly changing what that software was able to do — such object orientation could have a big impact in the way that marketing automation processes are conceived, implemented, and maintained.

Following the object-oriented train of thought, I can't help but ruminate about how object-oriented design patterns might be adapted in the context of marketing-as-a-system. Maybe there are marketing analogs to Adapter, Decorator, Singleton, and Strategy patterns. Or maybe there are entirely different pattern concepts — but patterns nonetheless — that can help structure and standardize this space.

It is unlikely a panacea for marketing complexity, but it could be a better architecture for managing such complexity. I don't know if Whatsnexx actually delivers on this promise — I've only read a few of their blog posts and browsed their web site — but I give them full props for promoting a brilliant way to frame "programmable" marketing.

CMOs to agencies: adapt or die

2012-01-24T10:19:48-05:00

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."

The Marketing Technology Frenemy Triangle

2012-01-23T10:05:30-05:00

The title of an article in last week's AdAge Digital was Tech-Consulting Giants Slide Closer to Creative-Shop Turf. The subhead read, "Deloitte, Accenture are among big IT players looking to learn digital biz of marketing brands to consumers."

You can almost hear the sound of cappuccino being sneezed out in a Madison Avenue office somewhere.

Brian Whipple, the CEO of Accenture Interactive, was quoted as saying, "Clients, in my view, are finding it more credible to reach into marketing from technology" rather than the other way around. Why? Because web sites and online advertising now require complex data analysis, customization, and global management. So now he has CMOs, not just his usual CIO clients, knocking on his door.

But don't worry, Madison Avenue. Whipple stresses that Accenture Interactive's relationship with agencies is "complementary, not competitive." They're working together with agencies to pitch new business. For now.

Meanwhile, creative agencies are becoming more tech savvy. Razorfish and SapientNitro would no doubt both claim that they can match Accenture Interactive's technology chops when it comes to digital marketing apps, web sites, and advertising. Omnicom has its creative technology venture, Code Worldwide. Fabric Worldwide, backed by WPP, touts their new "marketing operating system."

Then you have marketing software vendors, such as IBM, Aprimo, and ExactTarget, who are more than happy to provide integration and technical advisory services — encroaching on the domain of tech consulting shops. One could argue that IBM is more of a technology services firm than it is a software vendor.

Which is okay, because many of those tech consulting firms now have their own marketing software products. Accenture Interactive promotes six of their own marketing software products. Deloitte has alliances with other software companies, such as IBM — but for mobile applications they have Übermind.

It's a fluid mix of competition and cooperation. Coopetition. To visualize it:

To complicate the field further, for many of their respective customers, there's still an ongoing push-and-pull between the marketing department and the IT department over who has what responsibilities (and budget) in this new era. In some cases, CIOs and CMOs are the proxies for these frenemic giants.

But there are some upsides to this frothy mingling:

Creative agencies can use this as an opportunity to shift their revenue models to engagement fees and "subscriptions," like their new coopetitors, and break free of dependency on media buying inefficiencies — which are quickly becoming quite efficient.

Software vendors can take advantage of the deeper relationships with clients that services afford them to better inform their product development. The closer software engineers are to the actual problems that need to be solved, the more innovative their solutions will inevitably be.

And technology consultancies can piggyback on their marketing services mission to develop stronger relationships across the C-Suite — not just the CIO anymore, but the CMO and possibly the CEO — which can save them from the era of shrinking IT authority.

Best of all, these new kinds of competition can benefit CMOs most. It will give them more choices. It will give them more leverage to push their providers to innovate. And it makes the role of the CMO, as the conductor orchestrating the intermingling of these different participants, more valuable than ever.

2011 was a big year for marketing technology

2012-01-05T09:25:00-05:00

The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), a leading investment bank in the marketing space, issued a report yesterday of 2011 M&A activity across media, information, marketing services and technology sectors.

JEGI reports that those sectors "saw nearly 900 transactions in 2011 totaling $47 billion, a 9% rise over 2010."

From a marketing technology perspective, the marketing and interactive services sector is the most interesting, which had "291 transactions announced at a total value of $15.1 billion in 2011, up 17% and 33%, respectively, over 2010."

Some of the notable Q4 transactions in marketing technology included:

Oracle's acquisition of RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion
Oracle's acquisition of Endeca Technologies for $1.1 billion
Neustar's acquisition of TARGUSInfo for $650 million
Adobe's acquisition of Efficient Frontier for $400 million
Yahoo's acquisition of interCLICK for $251 million
SDL's acquisition of Alterian for $104 million

I'd also add that 2011 was a particularly big year for investment — or planned public investment — in marketing automation. In August, Eloqua filed to go public. In November, ExactTarget filed to go public, and Marketo raised an additional $50 million (a grand total of $107 million raised so far). Back in March, HubSpot raised an additional $32 million (a grand total of $65 million raised).

What does 2012 have in store?

According to JEGI, "The media and technology markets continue to evolve at a torrid pace, and companies are increasingly seeking assets to drive growth and provide new revenue streams. JEGI expects that a diverse and active pool of buyers, including both strategic companies and private equity firms, both of which have access to capital and will benefit from a steadily improving debt financing market, will drive vigorous M&A activity in the year ahead."

Add in the Eloqua and ExactTarget public offerings early in 2012, and I think it's safe to say that 2012 is going to be an exciting year for the marketing technology ecosystem.

Looks like I'm going to have to update my Marketing Technology Landscape Infographic soon.

You are what you don't automate

2011-12-19T15:51:04-05:00

"You are what you don't automate," one of ion's engineers commented in a meeting the other day.

It was in the context of a series of time consuming, manual steps that had to be done for a particular task. He attributed the adage to super-programmer Jeff Atwood, although I've not been able to find the reference.

It struck me as a brilliant way to frame the challenge of marketing automation.

See, in software engineering, most developers feel that time spent doing anything other than designing and coding great software is, well, kind of a drag.

So they try to automate as many of the boring processes of assembling, testing, deploying, operating, and debugging their software as possible. When they find themselves doing a rote task, the machinery in their heads starts whirling: is there any way to write a script so I don't have to do this by hand again?

To engineers, "you are what you don't automate" is a chiding remark: don't have you something better to do with your time than type that same sequence of commands over and over again?

Automation is about eliminating mindless busywork to make more room for creative and meaningful work. More time for distinctly human contributions.

In marketing automation, however, I often hear people talk about automating some of the most human aspects of their jobs: segmenting customers, judging opportunities, designing truly delightful customer experiences. Not surprisingly, such visions for automating that which humans do best often run into trouble.

Marketers should automate their own mindless tasks — things that take up their precious time that don't require thought. Many marketers I know still get bogged down in a lot of busywork of this kind, so there's clearly plenty of opportunity for automation to help.

But don't be quick to blindly surrender what your insight and instinct serve best.

"You are what you don't automate" can also be a badge of honor. What are you? The quintessential, best parts. Don't automate that.

Why marketers should learn how to program

2011-12-16T07:08:33-05:00

If you work in marketing, you might want to learn a little computer programming. Buy a book. Watch a screencast. Check out Codeacademy.

No, really. Suspend your incredulity for a minute. I'll explain...

It's not because you should have to roll up your sleeves and start writing your own marketing software. I'm the first to acknowledge that not every marketer needs to become a technologist.

However, I do believe that every marketer should develop a comfort with technology. And, over time, advance from comfort to understanding to intuition.

It's this intuition about how software works — call it "software thinking" — that is of immense value to modern marketers.

There are three reasons for this:

First, marketers are now flooded with an ever expanding array of marketing software to achieve their objectives, stay competitive, and keep up with the expectations of increasingly tech-savvy customers. But to non-programmers, software can seem like a black box. Learning how to program helps make that box more translucent. It moves from the Dark Ages of software superstitions to the Enlightenment of software reasoning. Knowing first-hand how software works give you confidence to wield it wisely and decisively.

Second, the cast of players in marketing's universe now includes a wide range of technical professionals: IT staff, software vendors, technical consultants, creative technology agencies, and — increasingly — marketing technologists within the marketing department. Learning a little programming makes you better able to communicate with technologists in their native tongue. It reduces the risk of critical details being lost in translation. It gives you first-hand insight into the concepts and concerns that drive your new technical collaborators.

Third — and by far the most important — learning to program builds up process design skills. Previously, marketers didn't have to do a lot of process design. But today, so much of the power of marketing software is its capability to systematize aspects of customer experiences and internal marketing operations, delivering more tailored marketing at scale. But it requires you to map out and implement ever more advanced processes that get "coded" and configured in such software.

For instance, consider this screenshot from a marketing automation platform (in this case, Eloqua):

This is marketing. It's a layout of a marketing process that a marketer has created — a flow of steps and decisions to deliver the right experience to a prospect and route them to the appropriate stage in the marketing-sales funnel. When constructed well, such automated flows can have a significant impact on your brand and marketing effectiveness.

This is also programming. It's presented in a visual manner, but the process implemented here is structured and behaves as a computer program: if X do Y, else do Z. It's the same kind of thinking that software developers apply in their craft.

Processes like this are springing up all over marketing — not just with marketing automation software. There are processes for managing your content marketing pipeline, running your conversion optimization experiments, handling your social media engagements, and so on.

Sometimes such process configuration is contained in a single software platform. In other cases, you have to design processes that cross multiple software products and define critical human touchpoints — when does a marketer or salesperson intervene, who specifically is that, what do they do, and how does the opportunity progress from there. Even if you just sketch such processes on a whiteboard, you are, in a very real sense, "programming" your organization.

It may sound straightforward at first. But as you invent more sophisticated processes, as you seek to make them more efficient and robust, and as you start to encounter interaction effects between different processes, it quickly gets challenging.

Learning a little computer programming arms you with core concepts and skills for tackling these challenges. You develop a better sense of how to structure processes with maintainability and adaptability in mind. How and why to do refactoring. How to debug a broken process in a systematic way. How to anticipate and handle exceptions. How to use software engineering approaches such as encapsulation and loose coupling.

More than anything, playing around with computer programming — outside the context of an actual do-or-die project at work — is a great way to get practice translating abstract ideas into concrete processes. It builds and tones your "software thinking" skills.

Even if you never write a line of raw software code in your professional capacity, your new strength in software thinking will prove invaluable to your marketing mission.

Follow the money from IT to marketing

2011-12-12T08:02:25-05:00

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).

A brief, hand-wavy history of marketing fragmentation

2011-12-08T20:16:51-05:00

Earlier this year, I gave a presentation at Search Insider Summit on the topic of marketing mash-ups. It was a whirlwind tour of how marketing started from a single discipline and, over the years, fragmented into a dizzying array of specialties and subspecialties.

It also offers a few ideas for how we can turn this fragmented landscape into a source of new cross-speciality creativity — and maybe, just maybe, unify marketing once again.

Someone just showed me that the video recording of that session is available online, so if you can stomach a frenetic amount of hand waving, you might enjoy this:

The Evergreen Laws of Marketing (techs take note!)

2011-11-16T15:55:12-05:00

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.

Think it doesn't apply today? Think again.

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. ;-)