Chief Marketing Technologist

Engineers are becoming a lot like marketers too

I spend a lot of time thinking about how engineering culture and capabilities are seeping into marketing's ecosystem. Marketers are becoming more tech-savvy by the day, which is a fascinating transformation to behold.

But it struck me recently how much the inverse is happening too: many of the signature characteristics of marketing have now become a part of engineering culture. Engineers are becoming quite marketing-savvy in their trade. This isn't about engineers working in marketing (although that's what marketing technologists do). It's about engineers natively applying marketing principles in their own endeavors.

No offense is intended to engineers by this remark! I know the old-school clichés — engineers considered most marketing to be fluff and spin. In days past, that was sometimes a fair indictment too.

But new-school marketing is different. Content marketing, social media marketing, and customer experience marketing are intently focused on delivering real value to prospects and customers. New-school marketers probably have as much derision for fluff and spin as any cynical system administrator caricature ever did.

New-school engineering is different than its predecessor too. The old-school clichés of engineers as poor communicators, sequestered in back rooms, disconnected from the business and customers, are now laughable. Some might argue that we're suffering from the polar opposite of that archetype — CNN just ran an article bemoaning the rise of "brogrammer" culture. But even without that extreme, it's not hard to see that software engineering has shifted to a highly collaborative, customer-centric profession that has become quite adept at outward communications, promotion, and business strategy.

I believe that three forces have driven this transformation:

1. Open source software communities
2. Agile software development
3. Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur

There are a lot of lessons that marketers can learn from these dynamics, so let's look at each.

Open source software communities as marketing organizations

Open source software has been tremendously successful: Linux as an operating system, MySQL as a database, Apache as a web server, and thousands and thousands of other great products and platforms. This success is certainly built on technical accomplishments — an extremely discerning kind of peer-reviewed ecosystem.

But open source success is also due to engineer-driven marketing. Open source projects exist in the marketplace of ideas, competing with each other for the precious commodities that marketers have always competed for — attention and adoption — and, even more ambitiously, participating contributors. The classic book The Cathedral & The Bazaar describes a number of the technical and marketing aspects of that competition from several early successful open source projects.

But since that book was written more than 10 years ago, the "marketing" aspects of open source seem to have only grown in popularity and sophistication — making them an integral part of engineering culture. Consider the following:

• Web sites for open source projects are increasingly well-designed and rich in content. Often this content includes social proof of well-known brands that have adopted the software and case studies of their implementations. They feature screencasts, presentations, and ebooks — deep, genuine materials that any content marketer would rightly envy.
• Great engineers and open source project advocates also use blogs prolifically to share ideas, persuade others to their point of view, and disseminate learning and knowledge related to their projects. The writing on many of these blogs is passionate and compelling, and in a very real sense helps build the brands of those individuals and their respective open source communities.
• Engineers engage in a highly effective kind of social media marketing through sites such as Stack Overflow, a Q&A site focused on technical topics. Projects and people earn credibility through the quality and quantity of answers to questions. A popular "tag" in Stack Overflow is a good sign of a thriving open source project. This is promotion through helping real customers with real solutions — fluff and spin are not tolerated — and it's impressively responsive.
• Personality has become a significant force in the promotion of many open source projects, where humor and wit combine with well-defined platform philosophies and "opinionated" software architecture. Exhibit A: the Ruby on Rails community and it's colorful founder David Heinemeier Hansson. These are brands that thrive on more than just their technical merits.
• Such open engagement in winning an audience is not restricted to online forums — engineers speak regularly at conferences, unconferences, meet-ups, workshops, hack-a-thons, and more. They invented many of these new event formats! From a marketing perspective, such events have been incredibly successful at building momentum for open source projects and communities. The quality of the presentations are often superb too, featured on SlideShare, and would make Garr Reynolds proud.
• Open source projects nurture loose and formal co-marketing relationships with each other. There are ecosystems of smaller developments that orbit larger open source platforms, such as the gems and plugins for Rails. There are also alliances of larger platforms that work well together, such as the popular LAMP stack bundle for web applications. Open source projects are often masterful at using APIs and data as a new kind of marketing to drive adoption.

There are more examples, but you get the point: open source software initiatives have become thriving ventures championed by engineer-led marketing. And for most engineers, since such marketing is genuine — developing meaningful connections with their audience — it's valued and respected. Say so long to the stereotypes of the last century.

Agile software development as a driver of engineering-marketing culture

Software development in the old days — like marketing in the old days — operated on long schedules of months or years, with the planning stage often separated from the implementation and delivery stages by huge gulfs of time. The process often isolated engineers from customer and market feedback along the way. And it all too frequently resulted in outcomes that made everyone unhappy. ("This isn't what I want!" "It's what you said you wanted 18 months ago!")

Seeking a better way, a group of pioneering engineers got together and penned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The first principle: our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery.

Agile software development methodologies put the customer at the center of the development process, emphasize continuous interaction between engineers and customers (or their internal proxies), and take a more iterative approach to implementing large projects to have faster feedback loops and quick adaptation to change.

Agile has been widely embraced over the past decade, and its adoption has fostered principles of customer-centricity deep in engineering culture:

• Understanding what the customer truly wants and values is given top priority in the development process. Developers and customers (or product owners on their behalf) meet daily to evolve the product vision together. The iterative design and implementation process lets the best solution emerge organically from showing, discussing, and revising features.
• Faster speed to market and quicker responses to opportunities/threats are enabled by the rapid iteration of agile development. The capability to react quickly — and through that be more competitive in the market — is a badge of honor for agile practitioners. "Release early and release often."
• Usability and user experience (UX) design are now a core part of development. The customer-centric design process has caused engineers to appreciate and value good UX and strive to incorporate that into products from conception — not merely sprinkled on at the end. Non-designers eagerly seek the participation of designers or find other ways to leverage their contributions (see Twitter Bootstrap as an example of an open source design framework).
• A commitment to consistent quality as a key feature through continuous integration and test-driven development tactics. These "baked in" approaches to quality provide the flexibility to release software more quickly and fulfill customer expectations more reliably.
• Metrics are used to quantitatively measure improvement. Data on how customers use products is treasured, both to uncover new opportunities for improvement and to gauge the success of new changes released. This is often business data as much as it is technical data, under a mantra of "you optimize what you measure." A/B testing is now commonly applied in many web software applications, encouraging agile teams to achieve the best user experiences through real-world experiments.

When it comes to product management in an agile organization, the perspectives of engineering and marketing blend together harmoniously into a hybrid engineering-marketing culture. What's considered great engineering is also what's considered great marketing. That's an amazing achievement when you think about it.

Frankly, many marketing teams could actually improve their own customer-centricity in other aspects of their work by modeling themselves on the success of agile engineering teams — in fact, that's exactly what agile marketing is all about.

Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur

Computer scientist Alan Kay famously remarked, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

While there have long been famous examples of engineers who became entrepreneurs — Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard and Bill Gates of Microsoft leap to mind — the correlation of those two callings has grown substantially in the Internet age. Consider some of the hottest Internet companies, all founded by software engineers:

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin who created Google
• Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook
• Jack Dorsey who created Twitter and then Square

There are literally thousands of examples of engineer-entrepreneurs from the past ten years. Most recently in the news, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger who created Instagram, which Facebook just purchased for $1 billion. But even on a more modest scale, consider the hundreds of thousands of offerings in Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPad.

Part of the explosion of engineer-entrepreneurs is due to the structural changes in the software industry. It has never been easier or cheaper to build great software products — leveraging open source foundations and scalable cloud computing infrastructure — to launch a new idea. And, thanks to the reach and network dynamics of digital marketing, it's never been easier or cheaper to promote and distribute those products worldwide.

These have enabled the explosion of engineering-driven entrepreneurship, but there's something else that's helped motivate it.

Over the past 10 years, it has become cool in engineering circles to be an entrepreneur. Building something technically impressive still earns respect. But building something that is commercially successful also earns respect — even if its technical merits are minimal. It's not just about the money either. It's about the pride of making something that other people want and architecting ways to grow and sustain a business around them.

Engineer-entrepreneurs are celebrated among their peers and by the world at large, and it's fundamentally changed engineering culture.

Even engineers who aren't full-time entrepreneurs increasingly have small ventures on the side: a Web.20 application, an iPhone or iPad app, a project on Kickstarter, etc. This instinct to tinker with new ideas to open up business opportunities has become so powerful within engineering culture that even large companies are seeking to tap into it for intrapreneurship, such as Google's 20% time.

The result: engineers increasingly think about the marketing and business dynamics at play with their products, entwining those facets of a successful product with their technical design and implementation. The concept of growth hackers arises from this interplay of marketing and technology.

If you consider all the above factors together, it's easy to see that new-school engineers have both tech savvy and marketing savvy.

And that blurs the line with new-school marketers — who are increasingly adding tech savviness to their marketing skills.

The new school is a convergence of marketing and engineering. And that's pretty cool.

Marketing technologist: part optimist, part pessimist

I think a great marketing technologist should be part optimist, part pessimist.

The optimist needs to indulge his or her imagination to drive the organization forward. To wonder, "what if?" To keep an open mind about new technologies and processes. To engage in the sort of creative free association and collaborative brainstorming that leads to innovation. And, most importantly, to be fearless in diving into the implementation of those ideas, making them real.

The pessimist — or realist, some would say — needs to ask, "What can go wrong?" It's a different kind of imagination, anticipating the ways that things might not work as expected. Of course, to be useful and not annoying, it needs to be combined with solutions for plugging those holes, guarding against those contingencies, or calculating when certain risks are acceptable and not worth addressing.

Another way to think of it is as two sides of a game strategy: offense and defense.

The optimist without the pessimist builds spectacular skyscrapers that fall apart when the first woodpecker gives them a rap. The pessimist without the optimist may never conceive of the skyscraper in the first place.

The Zen of Marketing Technology exists in the balance between these two halves.

Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers

Awesome little essay by Andrew Chen from last week: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. As far as I'm concerned, you can almost perfectly substitute "growth hacker" with "marketing technologist," as much of the rationale for this new breed of marketer is the same.

Here's his opening paragraph (emphasis added is my own):

The new job title of "Growth Hacker" is integrating itself into Silicon Valley's culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of "How do I get customers for my product?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what's already working.

At the end, he summarizes:

• For the first time ever, superplatforms like Facebook and Apple uniquely provde access to tens of millions of consumers
• The discipline of marketing is shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities
• Growth hackers embody the hybrid between marketer and coder needed to thrive in the age of platforms

Well worth reading the whole post.

P.S. Amazingly, "growth hacker" can't be generated by the marketing technologist job title automata. Will have to work on a patch.

The tech talent time bomb in marketing

One of the other points that leaped out at me in the Econsultancy/Adobe report I discussed earlier this week — Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance? — was the increasing challenges of finding good technical talent.

Under the heading "the tech talent time bomb," the report cites research from McKinsey that claims: "By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."

The Econsultancy/Adobe report suggested that the shortage has already hit many agencies and marketing departments:

"Interviewees for this report mentioned how technologically savvy people are hard to come by. This shortage is apparent in both hard technical skill areas such as tech development, specific areas such as data analytics, and softer areas including the requirement for good digital generalists who can combine broad knowledge of digital channels with the ability to see things from the point of view of the consumer."

"Salary inflation, particularly for developers, is a reality and becoming a real issue for some areas of the industry."

So what's an agency or in-house marketing department to do? Three suggestions:

Readjust budgets and cost models to accurately reflect tech supply and demand. A small number of incredibly talented and highly paid innovators can be much more effective than larger teams of average paid average performers — especially at the intersection of technology and creative. Don't be penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Invest in building a culture that inspires and rewards technical talent. This runs the gamut of active tech participation in management and strategy, tech-friendly ergonomics, progressive HR policies, sweet computers and devices, support for open source initiatives. Give technical talent the opportunity to make a significant impact and to be recognized for their contributions. This isn't just IT plumbing — this is the building of a grand estate from concept-to-completion.

Grow your own marketing technologist "stellar nursery." Put in place good programs to hire interns and junior staff members and shape them into tech-savvy marketers (or marketing-savvy techs).

The smart kids already crave this kind of opportunity. Get them vendor training on marketing technology products. Have them learn how to program (yes, even if they're not engineers!). Send them to technical and digital marketing conferences. And then push them to apply that learning in meaningful ways. As stars emerge from this process, move quickly to promote and reward them (before someone else snatches them from you).

Parents: you can do your part by planting the seeds of this exciting career in the heads of your children now. Firefighter? Astronaut? Movie star? Pfff, not nearly as thrilling — or, ahem, as lucrative — as being a marketing technologist. Well, maybe not more than the movie star... ;-)

Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance?

Maybe both.

It would be hard to overstate how thoroughly disrupted marketing has been by technology over the past 10 years — or how much disruption still awaits in the decade ahead. It's against that backdrop that the giants of the marketing industry — agencies and their conglomerate ecosystems — are increasingly wrestling with their evolving role in this new era.

Not unlike the struggle of marketing technology within client organizations — which is not only analogous, but directly intertwined into the agency question — everyone agrees that things have changed. But opinions run the gamut of how to strategically address that change. Is this about tacking the sailboat's course? Shedding weight and trimming the sails? Adding fancy new navigation equipment? Or is it more about abandoning the boat and going by airplane instead?

Econsultancy and Adobe just released a report, The Progression of Agency Value: Developing a Model for Agency Maturity in a Digital World, that looks at that debate from several angles. It contains a lot of great attributed (and unattributed) remarks from agency and brand executives, such as this gem from an anonymous strategy director:

"It's hard to know what the ad industry is any more, where it starts and stops."

Robin Bonn of Code Worldwide — a very different kind of firm in the agency ecosystem — is cited as saying, "Agencies still provide the magic of ideas, but technology will inevitably power most of the logic of implementation. Adapting to this sea-change in business model is proving very tough."

The Econsultancy/Adobe report frames this struggle according to the "progression of economic value" model that Joseph Pine and James Gilmore described as the foundation of the experience economy.

In the context of agencies, this report focuses on the "deliver services" stage on up. They characterize agency challenges with technology, big data, and the new skill sets required as a maturity model that advances from delivering services, to staging experiences, to guiding transformations:

In theory, it sounds promising.

But the rest of the world isn't necessarily holding their breath for that metamorphosis. As one director of digital marketing who was interviewed said (emphasis added is my own):

"In my opinion, companies who want to excel in the digital space need a strong internal team able to connect creativity and execution, possibly using different agencies to do that. At the end of the day, we don't need an agency to know what happens in the digital space: we all read the same articles and go to the same conferences. So we either need brilliant ideas or flawless execution from an agency."

An executive summary version of the report is available free from Adobe here.

P.S. On the marketing technology frenemy triangle, there's this quote in the report from a client-side global marketing leader:

"Traditional agencies that claim to have become digital or 'full service' are at risk of being put out of business by what we used to call systems integrations who have discovered that creating a pure digital marketing group (usually staffed by ex-digital agency people) and combining that with some really smart technical people (from the systems integration/technical delivery arm) makes for a very compelling offer in the digital age."

Brand impact or conversion rate? Both, please!

From my latest article on Search Engine Land, 5 Colorful Sketches on Conversion Optimization:

The accompanying write-up in the article:

There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing.

But it's a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions.

Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use to squeeze short-term bumps to your conversion rate. ("I promise you the world, just give me your email address and click 'Boom!'") But such chicanery costs you brand equity.

On the other hand, great brand-building content is often published without any direction towards a "next step." It leaves visitors dangling like a sailboat in the middle of a lake with no wind. Sure, they can paddle their way to a conversion step. But paddling is hard work.

The sweet spot is pushing the Pareto frontier of brand and conversion to achieve both. That's brilliant post-click marketing.

Click through for the other 4 sketches (although you've seen another one on this blog before)

The marketing technology ecosystem wheel

Experian — another one of those multi-billion dollar companies engaged in enterprise marketing — released their 2012 Digital Marketer Trend and Benchmark Report earlier this week.

Right up in the front of this hefty 154-page report is a spread on understanding the marketing technology ecosystem — which is clearly the substrate upon which modern marketing is being built. Experian includes a couple of great infographics that help visualize all of the different pieces in that ecosystem:

Any CMO at this point should be able to look at this "wheel" and speak to the marketing technology capabilities that they have in place — or are putting into place — for each segment.

An excerpt from the report's text associated with these graphics:

Consider how marketers can create the infrastructure necessary to support all the above-mentioned activities. The easiest way to break this down is to deconstruct the marketing technology ecosystem "wheel" into a customer intelligence platform comprised of critical marketing information and key "hubs" of functionality.

Built on a foundation of data, this hosted, end-to-end marketing solution leverages a three-hub approach to capture and integrate data from across channels (integration), understand how to maximize customer value (intelligence), and optimize customer interactions with context and relevance (interaction).

Admittedly, that last bit sounds like a sales pitch for Experian's specific solution. But I think the concept they're illustrating is broadly applicable — a core "system of record" platform interconnected with multiple hubs of context-specific solutions. Almost all of the major marketing technologies that would fit into that ecosystem are provided as hosted software-as-a-service.

HubSpot's brilliant marketing organization structure

Jonathon Colman, SEO marketer for REI, shared with me a deck he put together for ad:Tech, From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams, which has some great insights on agile marketing. Here's his deck:

From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams - adTech 2012

View more PowerPoint from Jonathon Colman

At the end, he included a number of links to other resources on agile marketing (including this blog, thank you!). As I browsed through them, I found a real gem that I hadn't seen before: Agile for Marketing, a SlideShare deck by the folks at HubSpot.

HubSpot has always been prolific at content marketing — they helped invent the field as one of the foundations of inbound marketing. This deck reveals how they've organized their marketing team to thrive using agile marketing. My favorite slide illustrates their team structure, built around the funnel:

It's clean, simple, logical — built from the ground up with the new marketing in mind.

They also have yet another term for marketing technologists: they call the role marketeering (marketing + engineering) to "build stuff (tools, apps, etc.) to support marketing goals."

Both decks — as well as the rest of Jonathon's reading list — are highly recommended.

Why landing pages are awesome (a Venn diagram)

I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey.

Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion interactive — so fascinating and rich with possibilities:

The intersection of performance marketing, content marketing, and technical wizardry. What's not to love?

Techs hiring creatives to embrace the creative world

A big part of this blog is encouraging marketers to bring technologists fully into their teams as a way to grok the use of technology in modern marketing.

A couple of days ago, AdAge ran an article — Why Facebook Is Hiring Ad Agency Creatives — that illustrates an example of the inverse: a technology company hiring creatives to better embrace the possibilities with the creative community.

During a session at the 4A's Transformation Conference, Facebook's VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, answered questions on why Facebook was hiring several leading agency creatives, such as Mark D'Arcy.

It isn't because they're looking to start their own agency.

"Creatives like talking to creatives," Everson said. "We need enough people at Facebook who can sit across the table from a creative leader and engage in a conversation about what the possibilities are."

"Mark has hired a handful of people around the world so we can have a conversation with the Jeff Benjamins [chief creative officer of JWT] of the world and chief creative officers."

Given that Facebook is arguably the epitome of a modern tech company — Mark Zuckerberg is the champion of The Hacker Way — I find Facebook's approach here to be an admirable endorsement of (a) the differentiated value that tech and creative specialists each bring to the table and (b) the enormous potential from their integrated collaboration.

Everson urged the audience to look at how Facebook deals with developers to get a sense of how it would like to deal with ad agencies.

Does your marketing team have a vision of how to deal with technologies and technologists?

P.S. On the topic of creative and technical commingling, Tim Suther of Acxiom published an article on CMO.com earlier this week — Mad Men Meet Their Match: Math Men — that makes the case for the collaboration between left-brain (tech) and right-bain (creative) professionals. Includes plenty of clever nods to famous advertising slogans, such as:

"While diamonds are forever, mass advertising is not. Marketing science alone won't be its replacement. Combined, however, the art and science of marketing are 'two great tastes that taste great together.'"

Sounds g-r-r-r-eat!

P.P.S. Is the inverse of a marketing technologist a technology creative?