Chief Marketing Technologist

Balancing marketing technology and IT at a Fortune 500 firm

Marketing technology management can look straightforward on paper, when analysts and pundit-bloggers such as myself draw simplified diagrams of new organizational structures with a few quick brushstrokes.

But the real work of implementing these organizational changes for "the new marketing" — and the cultural shifts entangled in that mission — especially at a major Fortune 500 company is considerably more complicated. I have tremendous respect for the people tackling that.

Therefore, it was my pleasure to be able to interview Mayur Gupta, the Global Head of Marketing Technology at Kimberly-Clark, to glimpse behind the curtain of that transformation in his organization.

Tell us a little about your background and what your role as Global Director, Marketing Technology at Kimberly-Clark entails.

I'm a marketing technologist who is part creative, part strategist, and part technologist. I recently joined Kimberly-Clark in August 2012 as the Global Head, Marketing Technology, a role that sits and fits within the CMO's world and the global marketing organization.

It's a bit difficult to pen down any role in marketing because it almost has to evolve at the pace of everything happening around us. But as we speak at this very moment, it involves curating, identifying, and establishing an agile marketing technology mindset, behavior, and a global culture — to not only execute but innovate our brand strategies.

"This group almost operates as a 'change agent' within our organization."

I intend to do this through a Marketing Technology Group (MTG) that works very closely with our IT organization. I am part of a Digital & Relationship Center of Excellence (DRCOE), which is packed with some incredible leaders across digital strategy, creative, commerce, and now marketing technology. This group almost operates as a "change agent" within our organization. I see the MTG defining the global vision, and blueprint to enable our brands' strategies and eventually deliver that most desired and relevant consumer experience.

Prior to joining KC, I pretty much spent most of my career at SapientNitro. The first few years there, I did everything from being a core Java developer to being a DBA, Unix administrator, and solutions architect. However, the last 7-8 years have been completely focused on digital marketing and marketing technology. From architecting and engineering a multi-channel integrated marketing automation and ad serving platform and running an innovation and digital production studio to playing a more thought leadership and marketing technology strategist role for a number of Fortune 500 clients.

How has it been making the transition from an agency to a dedicated role on the client side — especially around marketing technology? What did you expect? What has surprised you?

Interesting would be an understatement. I think it's more empowering in a lot of ways. Working on the services side in a leading agency, you are are more or less guided by certain boundaries or parameters. At times these are financial constraints from clients and sometimes very specific business challenges or priorities.

On the client side, it's a white canvas, which is a challenge — and an even bigger opportunity — especially if you're working in the evolving and rather chaotic space of marketing in a digital world. I don’t think I went in with any kind of expectations. I went in like a sponge ready to absorb with a very open mindset.

I have been pleasantly surprised though with the agility and the spirit to adopt and adjust to changes for a big organization like ours. I think we are pretty uniquely positioned in the way we have the DRCOE as an "idea engineering" layer that drives changes and strategic thinking, helping to mould the new norms and conventions.

"It is a gradual mindset shift, an effort to strike a balance between [IT and marketing technology]."

I give a lot of credit to our leadership overall, specifically in the marketing organization, to have the foresight a few years back to establish an "agency" of sorts within a bigger organization. It is an effort to bring digital strategy, creative and consumer experience, e-commerce and marketing technology together — something that a lot of agencies still struggle to adopt.

There is a long road ahead, especially the emergence of marketing technology within a pretty strong and widespread IT footprint. It is a gradual mindset shift, an effort to strike a balance between the rigor, process and focus on standardization, scale and globalization of an IT organization and the need for agility, nimbleness, and innovation of marketing technology to deliver excellence for our consumers.

What do you think the relationship should be between a marketing technology group that lives within the marketing department and the IT department? How has that been playing out in your organization?

This is where it gets really interesting. Firstly, I don't think we can draw a firm line that puts the Marketing Technology Group (MTG) in the marketing organization. I totally believe that it needs to exist, but where it lives, is very dependent on the organization, its leaders, and their mindset and culture.

The more important aspect is the recognition of evolution from a more conventional IT world. In my mind, an MTG can never replace IT. I see the MTG as a more strategic, innovative, and pretty lean layer. IT, on the other hand, is a more robust and scalable layer focusing on delivery and execution. One cannot replace the other. It's collaboration vs. competition.

An analogy that I use is the process of building a tall, multi-story building. There is a crucial role played by the architect to create the "blueprint." This is the role of a marketing technologist. But arguably a more important role is played by the actual builder — the IT organization — with a large team to transform the dream into reality. Irrespective of where the architect and the builder live, same organization or different, as long as they collaborate and understand each other, the building won't collapse.

"Both IT and marketing leadership are working very closely together to lay down the foundation for marketing in a digital world."

This journey at KC has been inspiring. We are in an evolutionary phase where both IT and marketing leadership are working very closely together to lay down the foundation for marketing in a digital world. It's a conscious effort to strike a balance and avoid either extreme. Needless to say, such cultural and behavioral shifts are hard to adopt, but we are on the right path and moving ahead with lightening speed to bring the right changes.

How does your marketing technology team interface with the rest of the marketing department?

The MTG is still in its infancy to be honest, but the engagement model is fairly simple — basically drop all lines and be part of the team from inception to delivery. The key aspect is a belief that technology (marketing or information) is no longer a commodity. It is as strategic as digital strategy and as creative as anything else we design.

The MTG plays a more proactive role in defining technology strategy and vision, rather than a reactive one. The recipe for success is a tight collaboration and ideation across strategy, creative, and technology to deliver a consumer experience. That is how I see the MTG operating with rest of the marketing organization, as well as brands and our digital partners and agencies.

"The recipe for success is a tight collaboration and ideation across strategy, creative, and technology."

From a technology perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see marketing departments facing over the next year? How should they tackle them?

I personally feel that the well-known technical challenges, like big data or attribution and modeling, are easier to solve. There are enough really smart people out there that will solve these through technology. The challenges I see lie outside of the core technology.

The first is what I'd call "The Challenge of Too Many." There are too many shiny disco balls out there. Difficult to say if this is a bubble, like the one we saw in the 90's, but the marketing world is definitely seeing more movement and innovation than any other sector at this moment. I think many marketing organizations are sucking things in like a vacuum — a tendency to pick up every shiny object out there. Big data, mobile first, predictive modeling, and so on.

The challenge is a lack of a connected thinking that brings all these different pieces together in a cohesive and well-knit machinery. We all seem to be on the soccer field. It's time for someone to go into the stands and have a top level view, to be able to orchestrate and position the right players to be at the right position at the right time.

"The challenge is a lack of connected thinking that brings all these different pieces together in a cohesive and well-knit machinery."

Secondly, the diversity in the digital space is bliss, but if it does not move towards a more consolidated foundation, it will be a big challenge. I'd like to see the likes of Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce come up with an open standard that allows marketers to focus on new and creative strategies and consumer experiences — and not worry about connecting 10 commoditized technology layers. A solid and standardized marketing operating systems — analogous to Android and iOS — with an open standard and framework to allow experiences through "apps" to be seamlessly installed.

Lastly, there's a challenging in shifting mindset and behavior in the way we perceive and deliver technology. Adapting to the fast pace of the digital world, adopting agile marketing, believing that — at times — done is better than perfect. I mean these are interesting times for marketing technology and very easy to fall into the trap of thinking of technology as an end and not an enabler.

If you could offer 30 seconds of advice to other CMOs on marketing technology, what would you say?

It's time to break free from the CMO-CIO barrier. Marketing technology demands a mindset, a behavioral and cultural shift, that goes beyond organizational boundaries.

"It is not a curriculum that's taught, but an experience that's gained."

Unfortunately it is not a curriculum that’s taught, but an experience that’s gained through collaboration and a common vision towards impactful consumer experiences. The sooner you adopt it, the faster you will respond to the ever-changing digital and consumer landscape.

See first what others see eventually and don't hesitate to fail.

Thank you, Mayur!

CMOs must become systems thinkers and culture champions

There are few companies that are witness to The Great Digital Transformation of the world at the scale of IBM.

And as that transformation overtakes the marketing department — an epic collision of cultures like no other in the history of business — I envy the court-side seats they have seeing this play out across many different organizations, in many different industries, all around the globe.

So I was excited by the opportunity to interview John Kennedy, IBM's Vice President of Corporate Marketing, on his perspective of this transformation — both with their customers and within their own organization.

Can you start by telling us a bit about your background and your current role as VP Corporate Marketing at IBM?

I'm IBM's Vice President of Corporate Marketing, where I'm responsible for the company's global brand development and marketing programs. I also lead marketing for IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative, which will reach its 5th anniversary this fall.

I started my marketing career at Procter & Gamble, where I worked on brands such as Downy, so my career has run the gamut from B2C to B2B.

I often quote IBM's CMO study from last year stating that marketers felt they were facing enormous complexity and that many of them didn't feel prepared for it. Would you say that's still true today? Why?

Yes and what's more, we're still at the beginning of this journey. The digitization of business and the growth of mobile commerce are in their infancy, especially when you look at emerging markets. For a few years now, IBM has been describing this concept of the world becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent — that the planet is getting smarter. We are now seeing this happen.

"IBM has been describing this concept of the world becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent."

Businesses are performing at new levels as a result of data — much of it customer data. This growing amount of data — which customers are generating from an increasing variety of sources — present a huge opportunity for CMOs. Marketers are analyzing big data to gain nuggets of insight into what customers want, which enables companies to deliver better products and services.

That changes the role of the CMO. So rather than focus on advertising campaigns and promotions, today's CMOs can use big data to understand how people connect, what they desire, and what motivates them to make a purchase.

We're seeing the marketing function change in three powerful ways. Marketers must get to know each customer as an individual; they must create what we describe as a "system of engagement" to create seamless experiences for customers across channels; and finally, marketers need to create a brand and company culture that are authentic and inseparable.

This is a big change from the past, when marketers planned and executed on the basis of aggregated demographics and broad campaigns. Big data provides marketers new visibility to their customers at the individual level, and to make marketing feel like a welcomed service instead of a promotional pitch. Content-oriented marketing models enable this shift since marketers are connecting with customers in new ways beyond demand generation and brand awareness.

"This is a big change from the past, when marketers planned and executed on the basis of aggregated demographics and broad campaigns."

How is the organizational structure and talent composition of the marketing department changing to adapt to this complexity, especially around its increased dependency on software and data?

Data-driven marketing is still in its infancy and some industries, like retail and banking, have a head start. Don't forget that marketing is probably the last C-suite function to be integrated with its own enterprise IT stack, playing catch-up to areas such as finance, HR and supply chain.

But CMOs are responding by integrating new kinds of capabilities on their teams. We're seeing new job titles. Not just to analyze and model information, but to create insights in new ways and better understand preferences. Within IBM, my teams are now working much more closely with IBM Research on areas like front-office transformation and social media. We're working with several scientists right now to understand the evolution of commerce and to improve our ability to quantify the business outcomes from some of these trends.

"CMOs are responding by integrating new kinds of capabilities on their teams."

How does this affect the relationship between marketing and IT?

It is creating a new partnership that is becoming essential to the company's performance. Technology is increasingly determining the customer experience in almost every industry.

This is driving CMOs and CIOs to align their strategies and create new working relationships. It's also helping CMOs and CIOs gain new visibility into the new realities of their mission — CIOs must move beyond a "firewall mentality," and CMOs must become "systems thinkers" so their ideas can scale across multiple customer sets, markets and countries.

"CIOs must move beyond a 'firewall mentality,' and CMOs must become 'systems thinkers' so their ideas can scale across multiple customer sets, markets and countries."

Since last spring, IBM has convened hundreds of CMOs and CIOs at events here in the U.S. and Europe. What we're hearing is that CMOs and CIOs know they must join forces. Because of their lack of technology training, CMOs are finally starting to look in-house to their CIOs to get a better handle on this new landscape. Conversely, more CIOs are looking for ways to work with CMOs as marketing continues to evolve.

So despite their different backgrounds and cultures, CMOs and CIOs need each other more than ever. We're definitely seeing that.

How are these changes impacting the culture of marketing?

Certainly, marketers are maturing as "technologists" and you can see that from the kind of work we are doing.

But there is another another aspect that is getting more attention. Because of the transparency of social media, CMOs are beginning to realize that they have to become involved in building a company culture that's in sync with the brand.

Every day, consumers are judging brands by what they do and what they say, and people don't hesitate to tell their friends — or tell the world — about gaps between the marketing promises and the actual experience. So much of a company's operations are shaped by its culture. As a result, we're finding more CMOs engaged in discussions about the company’s culture and how this impacts the brand.

"So much of a company's operations are shaped by its culture."

If I may ask, what has that transformation looked like at IBM? Can you share one of the challenges and how it was overcome?

A cornerstone of our transformation is to make IBM a social business in every aspect of the organization. This improves our ability to collaborate and innovate, to stay connected with clients, partners, universities and other communities, and to train the next generation of leaders.

This dates back to 1997, when IBM recommended that employees get out onto the Internet, at a time when many companies tried to restrict access. In 2005, we encouraged employees to embrace blogging, and in early 2008 became the first big company to issue social computing guidelines for employees. Today, we have the largest presence on any social platform you can think of, and we continue to provide resources, training and encouragement for the global workforce.

It's also transformed the way we reach out to clients. There's a lot of noise in social media, and it's a challenge to translate social touch points into sales leads. IBM has transformed its sales organization into a social selling juggernaut. In addition to lead generation and market basket technologies and active personal engagement on channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter, we use social listening tools such as sentiment analysis to identify opportunities and sales leads.

If you could offer just one, 30-second piece of advice to CMOs today, what would it be?

Reach out to your CIO. Help influence your technology strategy to migrate from the back-office to the front-office. Raise the awareness of your C-suite colleagues on the impact of a company's culture on customer experience and therefore the brand. Be a role model for change and transformation since that's the only constant on a smarter planet.

"Be a role model for change and transformation since that's the only constant."

Thanks, John.

Moving marketing beyond the arts and crafts department (interview)

While the marketing technology landscape is vibrant and crowded with innovators of all kinds, there are only a handful of companies that can legitimately take credit for having — near single-handedly — changed the very way marketers think and talk about marketing. HubSpot, the people who invented "inbound marketing," is one of them.

So it was great to ask Mike Volpe, their CMO, a few questions about how they manage their own marketing — including the use of agile marketing principles and marketing technologist-like staff — and to get his perspective on his company's positioning in the evolving marketing technology space.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and your passion for reinventing the discipline of marketing at HubSpot?

I've done online marketing since before you could buy ads on Google, back when AOL was basically the only show in town. I am very analytical (started my career in investment banking and have an MBA from MIT) and love helping make marketing about results and revenue generation, and move away from being the arts and crafts department.

But a few years ago I remember walking past my lead development team (aka cold calling) and then going to my desk and seeing my phone ring, but not recognizing the number and sending the call to voicemail. It hit me then that the buyer is now in control and we need to adapt our marketing to this new world.

"The buyer is now in control and we need to adapt our marketing to this new world."

Since then, I have focused on making all of my own marketing more inbound and helping educate marketers on how to do more inbound marketing and have their marketing be something their potential customers will love, not find annoying.

You're one of the pioneers of agile marketing, having been an early adopter of it with your organization. How does agile marketing work at HubSpot, particularly as you've grown?

Agile marketing was really helpful for us for a long time, it helped our team scale and grow without having multiple levels of organizational structure. Today we have moved on a bit — we still embrace the agile principles of moving quickly, being transparent, being agile — but we no longer stick to the rules in a strict manner. I think having followed the rules completely for over a year changed the culture of the team, and enabled us to still be agile with less of the formal process today.

Since HubSpot uses agile in its engineering organization too — right? — can you contrast some of the differences you see between agile software development and agile marketing?

It's funny, I think we embrace the agile principles in our development too — we iterate a lot and ship often — but we don't really do all of the agile process anymore. We have small teams that iterate a lot, ship often (multiple times a day), so we are agile (small A) but I guess we are no longer Agile (big A).

Another organizational innovation that HubSpot adopted early was the use of people with software development skills in the marketing department. I believe you call them "marketeers" — marketing + engineering. What kind of people thrive in that role?

This was a huge part of how we got started. Using technology as part of your marketing is critical, and if you can get those folks in-house, it helps you move more quickly.

It can be hard to attract and keep these folks, so sometimes you need to find these oddball hybrids of marketers and hackers who enjoy the marketing side of things but still can build software. There needs to be a reason they build marketing tools and not other types of software.

"You need to find these oddball hybrids of marketers and hackers who enjoy the marketing side of things but can still build software."

HubSpot often gets mentioned in the category of "marketing automation" software, but you tend to resist that label. What label do you prefer and why?

Marketing automation is really v2 of email marketing — better segmentation and personalization, but it is still email. We think marketing needs to be completely transformed to be more inbound and integrated. You want to attract people, not spam them, and you want to have a complete view of your customers from website to email to social to blog, etc.

I prefer the term marketing software or all-in-one marketing software or even inbound marketing software. What is interesting is that now that we have demonstrated success with this unique strategy — we have over 8,000 customers and will do over $50m in revenue this year — many "marketing automation" companies are buying social media companies or selling to CRM companies, basically confirming our strategy and trying to copy what we do.

Marketing automation is not the right thing for customers (it's just v2 of email marketing), so it is great to see the industry consolidating into more all-in-one marketing systems, because that is good for customers.

With a robust API and the launch of your App Marketplace, HubSpot seems to be positioning itself as more of a platform that could serve as the backbone for other marketing software applications. Is that accurate? How is that going and how do you expect it to evolve over the next couple of years?

Yes. Not only do we position ourselves that way, but I think it is actually TRUE. :)

As I mentioned earlier, I think marketing is going to become a first-class citizen in terms of technology in a company. The CFO has NetSuite, and VP of Sales has Salesforce.com and the CMO has... what exactly? Everyone knows the Gartner quote about the CMO spending more on technology in the near future than the CIO, and this is the reason why.

"I think marketing is going to become a first-class citizen in terms of technology in a company."

Now, if marketing has a new system of record, you want that system to have all your other tools easily plug into it. We have both an application marketplace and a service marketplace — so all of your marketing tools you buy and services you hire can flow through your HubSpot. We were the first company in the industry to launch these, and they have been a part of our strategy for a long time. Others have since copied us, again validating the strategy.

If you could offer 30 seconds of advice to a typical CMO out there today, what would it be?

Reinvent your playbook because your customers behave differently today.

Thanks, Mike!

BI and marketing should be peanut butter and jelly (interview)

If you were to take a poll of the hot topics in marketing these days, "social media" and "big data" would both be top contenders.

So when the folks at Viralheat, a provider of social media marketing software (covered in TechCrunch earlier this year), invited me to interview their Director of Business Intelligence, Erin Robbins O'Brien, on her perspective of "big data" and marketing, the hard part was narrowing my list of questions.

Tell us a bit about Viralheat and your role as Director of Business Intelligence.

Viralheat provides social media monitoring and analytics to businesses of all sizes, from individual contractors to agencies to enterprise clients. Viralheat was created with the belief that social media insights and management should be available to everyone, not just those with big budgets. From that we have developed proprietary technologies including a sentiment analysis tool that utilizes a combination of natural language processing and machine learning, as well as a (patent pending) Human Intent tool, which identifies social leads. One of the things I'm most excited about for marketers is our influencer identification capability.

My role at Viralheat has evolved as we have grown as an organization. I actually started out running the marketing department, which has encompassed public relations, customer success, community management and advertising — in addition to traditional marketing duties such as email and lead generation. My background is in digital strategy and human behavioral sciences, so as the company grows I am able to take on a role that allows me to utilize those skills as a more formalized job (meaning there aren't only four of us here so I can stop wearing 15 hats!).

Some of the things I work on include the aggregation of all of our data, across marketing, user engagement, website, in-product, customer support, etc., into a single repository. By utilizing a distinct categorization system, I can compare campaigns, marketing channels, target audiences and much more across every facet of the company, so that we can make smarter product, marketing and positioning decisions moving forward.

How do you see the relationship between business intelligence and marketing? Is it changing?

It should be peanut butter jelly time between us. Honestly, there is so much value that each position can provide to the other, anything other than a symbiotic, reciprocal relationship is both ludicrous and useless. Business intelligence needs marketing to provide feedback about the customer experience and to set up campaigns and outreach in a way that can be measured and useful to the rest of the organization. Marketing needs business intelligence to aggregate data from across every corner of the company, industry, and competition to give them the best chance at generating leads, reducing churn, and upselling users. Pilot and navigator.

"Marketing needs business intelligence to aggregate data from across every corner of the company, industry, and competition."

It's not always like that though. The relationship will have to evolve. Right now, not every organization has a business intelligence department and sometimes, if they do, they're not in direct communication with marketing. I've seen marketing professionals who are unsure what to do with the mountains of stats and analytics that BI teams can provide and BI teams that wonder why marketers aren't measuring things differently. Those, along with other issues, are things we've got to sort out together, for the survival and betterment of both groups.

What's the difference between "big data" and "small data" in marketing? Is it quantitative or qualitative?

People often get hung up on "big" as a reference to millions or billions of pieces of data. While the volume of data is a contributing factor, there are actually three components that typically determine data size. With regards to marketers, data can be quantitative or qualitative in nature, but should have some form of measurement or scoring regardless of type.

The three contributing factors to data's "bigness" can be broken down as follows:

1. Condition — Condition can also be referred to as "cleanliness." As an example, a list of email addresses from existing customers that has been checked for unsubscribers, valid and current addresses, etc., is considered "clean." To be small data, it must be clean. Conversely, a purchased email list that has yet to be validated (correct address, on target, willing to receive messages from you) is "big data" as it requires time and manpower to check.
2. Location — This refers to where the data is coming from and how compatible it is with the final format you need it to be in. Data that requires merging from multiple sources in a variety of formats or with differing variables is "big data." If you take our email example, if you have a list of users saved in an email management program, such as MailChimp or Marketo, and it's ready to have emails sent immediately, that is considered "small data," whereas if you have to merge multiple sources together and reformat them to get them into your email management tool, that can make this "big data."
3. Population — This refers to the individuals that have qualities in common to the need in consideration. Sticking with the email example, "small data" is comprised of a known population that is not expected to have changes to its composition in the short term. This allows marketers to use this data to answer a specific question or need now. Conversely, "big data" would represent a large purchased email list that includes unknown addresses, possible duplications, unsubscribes or irrelevant targets. This list cannot be used for targeted email marketing sends in its current form (at least not by a good marketer) and must be "cleaned" first.

A good way to think about this is that if you had a list of one million known customers in a list with valid, up to date information, already loaded into your email management system — sending them an email would be a snap. Conversely, a list of 100 people with invalid email addresses, unknown recipients or formatting problems would take more time to clean and work with than that list of one million conditioned people.

How does this explosion of data in marketing change interactions between brands and agencies?

There are a number of ways that the "data explosion" has changed the way brands and agencies work with each other. A few of the most prevalent I have seen include:

• More channels/platforms mean more places to gather data from, making for more complex reporting.
• Increasing numbers of dashboard and data companies that allow both brands and agencies a glimpse into what's going on across marketing efforts — this has both positive and negative repercussions of course.
• More data doesn’t always mean better decisions; sometimes it's just more data. Having a team of people that know how to analyze what information you're collecting and then turn it into smarter marketing decisions is key.

"More data doesn't always mean better decisions; sometimes it's just more data."

Brands and agencies need to find a way to agree on who will report on certain items, and ensure a closed loop reporting system so that knowledge flows in both directions. Agencies providing analytics back to brands without receiving clear direction back based on that input is going to ensure brands keep getting the status quo.

What are some of the common mistakes marketers make with data?

The majority of missteps I see across all levels and types of marketing (agency, brand, consultant, etc.) are made innocently, not maliciously. A couple of the more common ones include not having a large enough (or accurate) sample to justify the decision made and failure to set metrics or ways to measure efforts across all efforts, (i.e., if you are measuring emails and advertisements by things like clicks and open rate, then the same needs to be done across social media efforts such as retweets and likes).

What skills should marketers develop to be better prepared for harnessing data in their jobs?

I think the skill that most people have to work is preparedness actually. I can't tell you how many times on both the brand and agency side, I had people call me and tell me they wanted to measure a campaign that had been live for days or weeks already. What happened to setting a baseline for comparison first? What happened to creating relevant measurement tactics so that the data could not only be captured but easily compared later? What about setting up metrics for the effect of competitor campaigns and general industry trends in comparison with your campaign? All of these opportunities are missed when you are retroactively hurrying to collect information for a report due that afternoon.

If you were going to give a CMO one piece of advice on the future of data, what would it be?

Everything is measurable, and data is your friend. Even if the numbers aren't making you look like a hero today, what they should do is help build a path for you to get there. By working with the data from the onset, and making sure everything is measured across your organization, you can not only recognize a downward trend quickly, you can also identify what set it on that path and start to correct it.

"Everything is measurable, and data is your friend. Even if the numbers aren't making you look like a hero today, what they should do is help build a path for you to get there."

Note, this is also possible if you walk into a situation where there has been no measurement and campaigns are already running. Set your baseline from where things are now (even if it's a mess) and start measuring everything new you do. It’s a challenge, sure — but it's never to late to start making the right decisions.

Thank you, Erin.

CMO should focus on process, content, and skills (interview)

Marketo is one of the leading providers of marketing automation software.

"No IT" was one of their early selling points, and I remember thinking at the time that represented a major inflection point in marketing's relationship with technology.

So I was excited to have the opportunity to interview Jon Miller, their VP of Marketing Content and Strategy, on the impact they've seen technology have in the marketing department over the past 6 years.

Here's his perspective:

Marketo was one of the first marketing technology companies to emphasize "no IT" as one of its value propositions to marketers. What does the relationship between IT and marketing look like these days?

In the past, the relationship between IT and marketing was strained. IT departments have always been incentivized to focus on revenue generating aspects of an organization, but too often marketing was seen as a cost center. As a result, marketing had to fight for resources, and they began looking for ways to take matters into their own hands. Five years ago, if a marketer created his or her own end-to-end campaign, that was a revolutionary feat.

Today, with the use of new analytics, Marketing is increasingly taking on the role of a revenue driver in the organization. That's a key reason why Gartner reports that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. And it is also changing the relationship with IT. CIO's are stepping in to work with marketing more than ever — so now there is less work around and more work together.

Now that CMO's are selecting and operating marketing technology platforms such as yours — for most CMO's, that's uncharted territory — how are they adapting to this new responsibility? What challenges do they still face?

Even if we have marketing automation that is easy to buy, easy to own, and easy to use, it doesn't mean that marketing is easy. In fact, marketing has become increasingly more complicated as the buyer landscape has shifted. This means the modern CMO has to focus on three key areas:

Process: As the old saying goes, "don't pave the cowpaths." In other words, don't automate old and bad processes when you are introducing a new technology into your organization. Instead you have to quickly iterate, and be open to changing old habits. New technology will require a new way of doing things. Additionally, you have to re-align how marketing works in tandem with the rest of the organization. Sales and marketing alignment is a huge part of a marketing department's success, so re-think how the two teams work together.

"New technology will require a new way of doing things."

Content: Content is the fuel that feeds the technology. You need to have great content to feed your entire sales pipeline from the top of the funnel, to your lead nurturing and content that signals buying intent when downloaded. Marketing software is powerful, and can score your leads based on the content they download. But again, you need a variety of content for this to be successful, and you need to think about your buying stages and personas. Unfortunately, many companies don't have content that is non-promotional. Self-promotional content does not work, especially in the early stages of buying. Invest in thought leadership.

Skills: Because technology is so prevalent in modern marketing, proficiency with marketing software and in-depth knowledge of online channels are both crucial for your team's success. Additionally, your talent must be both technologically adept and analytical. They must think about process and optimization. Traditional marketing skills are useful as well, but a well-rounded team will have these newer skills as well.

"Because technology is so prevalent in modern marketing, proficiency with marketing software and in-depth knowledge of online channels are both crucial for your team's success."

With all this new technology in the mix, what does the modern marketing org chart look like? Are there new roles? New arrangements of existing roles?

Yes. At Marketo we talk about the Demand Center. As you grow as a company, you need to organize for scalability. At Marketo, we have built a hub and spoke model that we call the Demand Center. Around the Demand Center we have Inbound, which focuses on social and other inbound programs, and various Demand Generation Teams, who have quotas and execute our key programs. The Demand Center does about 30-40% of our core Marketo program work to support the Program Managers and Inbound Teams.

The Demand Center has the following divisions:

• Integrated Marketing: This is like our service bureau. The Integrated Marketing team builds landing pages and emails, supporting the Program Teams.
• Middle of the Funnel: They are in charge of creating our nurturing campaigns.
• Marketing Operations: This team is really focused primarily on technology, data, and measurements.
• SDRs (Sales Development Reps): Our sales front line. They are the first to respond to and qualify marketing leads.

How is the "technologification" of marketing departments effecting their expectations and relationships with agencies?

Done well, there is opportunity to create more alignment. Applications such as Basecamp, wikis, etc. have already begun to revolutionize these relationships. Additionally, collaborative cloud technologies have enabled work to be conducted from any computer, anywhere in the world. And as marketing software becomes more prevalent, there will be even more synergy and alignment.

As an example, today lead generation agencies deliver flat spreadsheets with a long list of leads on a weekly, monthly, or one-time basis. This is a pain for a marketer. They are slow to respond and you have lost valuable data on what they are doing and how they are interacting with your content. But when marketing departments and lead generation agencies share common technology, the leads and information can be synced in real time, and behavioral data is never lost.

"When marketing departments and lead generation agencies share common technology, the leads and information can be synced in real time."

Over the 6 years since Marketo was founded, you've worked with thousands of marketers around world. What are some of the other changes in marketing management that you've seen over that time?

The two biggest changes I have seen in marketing are better marketing measurements and the evolution of how we use social. It has long been the Holy Grail to measure marketing activity and program ROI, but attributing impact has been difficult — there are often too many touches. In the last few years it has been possible to see touches and understand all contributions, dramatically improving marketing ROI and decision making.

Social has changed the way marketers can interact with the buyer and track their engagement over time.

Marketers can leverage applications for social publishing, social media monitoring, presence management, and social campaigning. And today there is a new opportunity for marketers to experiment with peer-to-peer sharing to provide a social lift to every campaign that are already doing. It took a few years to figure out how to use the web as a marketing tool, and now we have to figure out social. There is so much more to social than just publishing on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks, Jon!

Insights from the explosion of marketing touchpoints

At the Online Marketing Summit here in Boston last week, I caught up with Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua.

I've been a fan of Steven's since his first book on the transformation of sales and marketing, Digital Body Language. He now has a new book — Revenue Engine: Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage — that continues this discussion on the new marketing.

So I took advantage of our rendezvous to ask him a few questions...

What makes this new marketing different?

According to Steven, we're on the tail end of a decade long transformation of buyers owning access to sales information, controlling their destiny in the sales process. A buyer can go where they want, at any point in the so-called sales lifecycle — ask a question on Quora, follow accounts on Twitter, chat with friends on Facebook, visit your web site, your competitors' web sites, read an analyst's blog, a customer's blog, etc. Buyers decide what they want, when, and from whom.

"Where you need to be to interact with buyers is not in marketing's control," insists Steven. "You have to be where the buyers go."

The overwhelming difficulty with that today, however, is that there has been an explosion in the number of outposts where buyers go. "This can be a little chaotic," Steven admits. "But we have one advantage. Because so many of these outposts are digital, we can instrument what the buyer does, who they are, what they interact with."

In Steven's view, what makes marketing so different today isn't just the number of new outposts or the operational challenges that presents. Says Steven, "The new part of today's marketing is bringing all those pieces of insights on the buyers together."

"So many of the individual clues are small — really small," he points out. Any one follow on Twitter or visit on your web site doesn't — and shouldn't — register on marketing's Richter scale. "Any one thing does not a buyer maker. They're only relevant in the aggregate."

Digital Body Language was about buyers moving online. Revenue Engine is about harnessing the digital clues of those buyers in aggregate.

What does this aggregate view look like?

Although a linear pipeline — the classic sales/marketing funnel — doesn't perfectly define reality for any one prospect, it continues to be a pretty good model for managing the flow of prospects to customers in aggregate.

"It's important to look at the overall funnel," says Steven. "From early-stage marketing to late-stage selling."

According to Steven, there are five dimensions of this funnel that are important to understand:

1. Value. "What is the economic value in the funnel right now, from earliest stage of awareness through education and investment? How big is that total pipeline, even 6 or 8 quarters out, and how big is each stage?"

2. Reach. "At each stage of the funnel, how many folks — not the size of the deal, which is the value metric above — am I able to engage? This is about uncovering where the choke points are, identifying gaps."

3. Conversion. "What percentage make it from one stage of the funnel to the next? What are the fall off points?"

4. Velocity. "The speed at which deals move through the stages of the pipeline — but specifically the speed from each stage to the next, identifying the points of slowdown. Each one can be affected with different levers, but you need to understand the metrics before you apply the lever."

5. Return. "Dollars in, dollars out — how efficient is this total pipeline?"

Steven believes that this total pipeline, with these dimensions transparently in view, is the key to sales and marketing alignment. "Sales people see one quarter out from their pipeline. Marketing generally sees not the current quarter, but two or three quarters out. The challenge is tying those two things together into a unified view with a longer time horizon and understanding the process governing that flow.

This shared, holistic view enables better conversations and coordination between sales and marketing. "Fuzzier things that marketing used to say, such as, 'We need to do some branding,'" explains Steven, "Now means, 'We need broader reach at the earliest end of the funnel.' Organizations can have intelligent discussions about branding. 'We're in tough economic times, so we can cut back on branding now, but we will take a hit 6 quarters out.'"

What is the role of software, technology in this transformation?

"The technical challenge of modern marketing is that explosion of smaller touchpoints," replied Steven. "The marketing team is tasked with understanding all of these touchpoints, but each individual touch point is too small to care about. You can't put the human effort to personally respond, 'Oh, look, a Facebook fan!'"

"Marketing must aggregate these touchpoints — they're small, but relevant in aggregate. Such aggregate analysis can only be done with technology. Minimalist technology, such as Excel spreadsheets, is not sufficient to tease out the insight."

But are marketing departments ready to manage such technology?

"It's a hard transition, but marketing departments have been wrestling with this transformation for 10 years," notes Steven. "In the last two years, it has become the norm. Marketing operations, marketing processes, the analytics — this technology is now the norm."

Do marketers need a different set of skills for this?

"You need people in place who are a little better about numbers, metrics, analytics, operations — all of the little details that need to be mapped out on a whiteboard, such as figuring out the exceptions when buyers jump in and out of your pipeline. This is less of a creative discipline, more of an analytic discipline.

What about the IT department?

"The group that is having to reinvent itself more than marketing is IT," remarks Steven. "IT, historically, was all about servers, networks, wiring, software patches. Now with SaaS, that wiring challenge has been placed back on the vendor. Forward-leaning IT organizations are now taking on the 'whiteboarding challenge' — understanding the data, how we're going to track things, how these five or six systems are going to talk to each other."

"Quite technical marketers or business-savvy IT folks, comfortable talking line of business — you'll see organizations structured both ways."

Thanks, Steven!

Mashing media, advertising and technology (interview)

I lived in New York City for about five years, and if I had to name one thing about the city that I loved most, it was its energy. The city just crackles with creativity and drive. Our inaugural marketing technologist interview was with New Yorker Jonathan Mendez, who in turn, introduced me to today's metropolis-based interviewee: Darren Herman.

Like Jonathan, Darren is a multi-faceted marketing technologist: an entrepreneur, an early-stage venture investor, and the chief digital media officer of kbs+p/The Media Kitchen. Some of kbs+p's clients include Giorgio Armani, Victoria Secret, Delta, PBS, Vanguard. As we were editing this interview, Darren unveiled a new initiative — kbs+p Ventures, an early-stage investment arm of kbs+p. (Coincidentally, their first announced investment was in Jonathan Mendez's Yieldbot.) He also has a terrific blog where he shares additional thoughts and ideas on this space.

Darren Herman, Chief Digital Media Officer, kbs+p/The Media Kitchen

I find that many of the people who really "get" marketing technology have been Internet entrepreneurs or digital agency leaders. You're both! What led you into this field?

Yeah, my background and CV wouldn't pass the traditional talent management/HR departments of most major agencies, and I think that's fantastic. I started my "career" as an entrepreneur at a young age and got my feet wet with building startups from the ground up.

I was introduced to the first love of my life, the Apple II and fascination began. I've done everything from contracting dysentery on the Oregon Trail, traveled around galaxies in Pax Imperia, and built some of the worlds largest cities (Sim City). [Ed: Early video game references here and here.]

After 12 years of building technology driven startups, I entered the agency world with a transparent agenda of bringing the two worlds together. At kbs+p, we call this Curated Collision.

Innovation happens in garages of Palo Alto. Innovation happens in the lofts of NYC. And many places in between. In order to truly understand where innovation is happening and how to harness it, you need to have experienced it first-hand and deeply participate in it. Sending out an RFP to a startup and asking them to fill out a proposal in Excel format is not harnessing early stage innovation.

"Sending out an RFP to a startup and asking them to fill out a proposal in Excel format is not harnessing early stage innovation."

I'd like to think that we're making great strides at understanding how marketing and technology are coming together and how to build and invest in the capabilities that an agency would need both internally and externally for the forthcoming decades.

On your blog, you wrote that you are fascinated by the "white space" that exists between media, advertising and technology. What do you mean by that?

The application of technology within the media and advertising world is sexy to me. I don't know why, but somewhere in my DNA is a strand that recognizes this. Depending on the startup I'm working on or the agency I'm at, I get to position myself within this white space. In some cases, it's only 2 of the three. Today, it's all 3. It's fascinating.

The white space is ripe for innovation. Chaos breeds opportunities for taming and when you are able to tame an area, you are recognizing opportunity and building both process and foundations that allow you to innovate on top of. Sometimes this innovation is technical. Sometimes it's process oriented. Either way, it's the opportunity of the white space that is thrilling because most people are scared of it and don't want anything to do with it. I like to think that I thrive on the uncertainty and chaos.

"The white space is ripe for innovation. Sometimes this innovation is technical. Sometimes it's process oriented."

Tell me about your role as Chief Digital Media Officer at kbs+p. What kinds of marketing technology are you working with these days? How do you evaluate and adopt them, internally and with your clients?

As Chief Digital Media Officer, I get to play both a client-facing role and an internal operations role. As client-facing, I along with my team provide strategies and tactics that allow us to put forth the best media plans and digital direction possible to hit whatever their goals are. From an operational perspective, I make sure we have the best tools and processes in place to deliver on both our client goals but also agency efficiencies. Part of my day involves talking with our clients, part of my day involves meeting with various agency brand teams, and the other parts are meeting with partners and vendors who can make our total solution/product better. Each day is different and that's what the thrill of the job is to me.

We're seeing a boom in the types of marketing technologies that are available to us. Everything from next generation search bid management tools to our internally incubated trading desk and DSP, Varick Media Management, through to data management platforms, dynamic creative, etc. The list can go on for pages. However, there is a trend I'm seeing and it deserves a paragraph or two here.

"We're seeing a boom in the types of marketing technologies that are available to us."

Digital is driving cross-silo collaboration and the tools that are being built are best used by multiple agency teams. Let me explain. In the early days of digital, and even today in some agency cases, digital is/was silo'd. There was a digital group that used digital tools and planned digital campaigns. By doing this, agencies essentially created a silo. Silos in themselves exhaust inefficiencies and are hard to integrate into the fabric of the larger agency. What I'm seeing today withi the digital landscape and how we're uniquely positioned is that agencies who can offer an integrated offering (creative + media + communications) can drive a BIG digital idea that is exponentially greater than if it's silo'd into one area. Think about it — any digital idea needs development, creative, media, PR, etc. If it's all in one place and controlled tightly, it can be positively executed against.

Marketing technology (or ad tech as I refer to them) tools are being created now that service horizontally, not just vertically. These are the types of tools that are extremely important because they drive integration and they create stickiness. An example of this is a tool that can deliver a form of media, but drive insights that inform planning, and make ad operations much simpler. Maybe too simple an example but at least you get the picture. I think there is significant opportunity there and in order to deliver digital, which is not easy, you need to be integrated or at least have extremely tight agency partnerships and work really, really hard and well together.

You've worked with many different companies as an entrepreneur, an advisor, a consultant, an agency executive. From your experience, what makes some organizations more successful harnessing marketing technology than others?

Marketing technology generally disrupts whatever came before it. In order to be successful with marketing tech, you need to understand and let go of previous iterations and ideations of how you executed in the past. It's hard to let go of what worked in the past — and having the vision to understand how the new shiny tool will deliver differently. Firms who have the vision and the patience to integrate a new tool have, in my opinion, the best chance of harnessing all of its power.

"In order to be successful with marketing tech, you need to let go of previous iterations and ideations of how you executed in the past."

Where firms fail is when they dip their toe in the water. You cannot do this, but all too often, it's done. You can't half-ass an integration. It'll fail. You'll end up spending a lot of money for almost no gain.

Take the installation and integration steps seriously and you'll have the best chance of successfully launching marketing technology. Then of course, but you'd be shocked at how many companies don't do this — TRAIN your staff. Spend time and resource to make sure all of your staff knows how to use the tools. Do not keep the tools silo'd into just one business unit.

You've written that we're entering "the data decade." Beyond standard analytics, what should marketers — and marketing technologists — be think about with big data?

The astute data person calls me out on this every time. The reason: we've been in the data decade every since products and services exhausted data!

However, what I refer to regarding the "data decade" is the proliferation of thinking around harnessing the data to make business transforming decisions which are now much quicker due to digital exhaust. All too often we think of these decisions to improve media efficiency and targeting, but we also can use this data to inform product development, customer service, human resources, and the list goes on.

"We can also use this data to inform product development, customer service, human resources."

Marketing technologists could be at the forefront of this as they are the ones who are identifying opportunities to harness technology for their organization. I think though that "marketing" would just sell it short — depending on the brand/agency of course. You should think about how to leverage technology to support the entire organization. There are key decision makers and influencers outside of the marketing group, so make sure you have the opportunity to figure out who they are and align them with the vision.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Since innovation is happening at such a rapid pace, the best CMO's will be (a) open to innovation and (b) able to identify where they should place their bets.

If the CMO doesn't have an informal council of people to call upon to help vet opportunities, they should plan for this. Innovation doesn't happen in a vaacum and there takes an entire village to raise a startup, so CMO's should make friends with venture capitalists, world-class entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to make sure that they understand the entire ecosystem.

"CMO's should make friends with venture capitalists, world-class entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to make sure that they understand the entire ecosystem."

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Tinker as much as you can. Tinkering is easiest when you work within a technology company, but since many marketing technologists work within agency walls without technology, it's hard to get the experience. If you want to deal with technology on the day to day, especially in marketing and advertising, go take some time and join a technology driven startup (or larger company) and learn the ins/outs.

"Tinker as much as you can."

Thanks, Darren. Inspiring ideas!

Marketing technology at a 113-year-old firm (interview)

Disruptive innovation can be exhausting. Exciting. Full of opportunity. But also relentless hard work. And with all the disruptive innovation wrought by the Internet — particularly the seismic changes in marketing — there are times when even the best of us could use a little boost of inspiration.

Today's marketing technologist interview was just that boost of inspiration for me because it features a 113-year old company — Thomas Publishing Company — which has adapted itself into this new digital century. And, hey. If a company with that much legacy can change, the rest of us have hope!

Brian Makas is the Director of Marketing Technology & Business Intelligence at Thomas's new incarnation, ThomasNet.com. He's had the opportunity to participate in their transformation at this nexus of marketing and technology. Here he offers us some of his perspective on that process, what his role looks like today, and more.

Brian Makas, Director, Marketing Technology & Business Intelligence, ThomasNet.com

Thomas Publishing Company was founded in 1898, right? What has it been like implementing digital strategy at a firm with such long history?

That's correct. Thomas Publishing Company was founded in 1898 when it started publishing the Thomas Register. For more than 100 years, the Thomas Register was the foremost directory of the industrial marketplace. That said, when I came on board in 2006, Thomas made the decision to stop publishing the print directory in favor of ThomasNet.com.

When ThomasNet first went online, it still listed the same 650,000 distributors, manufacturers and service companies within 67,000+ industrial categories... but... that was about it. It didn't take long before we realized that for our clients to be truly successful, we also needed to help them deliver the detailed content that engineers and purchasing managers want. And we needed to give clients a way to track their efforts and correlate that to their success.

So, I'm fortunate enough to have the best of both worlds. While I have access to over 100 years of industrial expertise, ThomasNet itself still has a fresh entrepreneurial spirit — in how we enable our clients' marketing departments to succeed and in which we, ourselves, engage in digital marketing.

Can you share with us a little bit about how your team is structured and the type of projects you're working?

To describe my job, can I just go ahead and check off every box in your 8 Things a Marketing Technologist Should Know post? In this last week alone I've been worked on optimizing landing pages, tweaking our social and search engine marketing initiatives, streamlining our CRM system, upgrading our marketing automation platform, providing our clients with more sophisticated means of tracking their return on investment and, finally, connecting a half dozen or so once-distinct data silos.

Although I get knee deep in code when it’s absolutely necessary, cloud technology makes it possible for me to leave ownership of the technology where it belongs: with the subject matter experts rather than with a team of technical experts.

"Cloud technology makes it possible for me to leave ownership of the technology where it belongs: with the subject matter experts."

How does your marketing technology team fit into the larger marketing organization? What's your relationship with IT?

Our IT department is responsible for the management of all physical (or "on premise") infrastructure. The marketing department is responsible for everything else, including any applications hosted in the cloud.

While IT provides a critical service — and we have a very positive relationship — our interactions are essentially limited to times when we need new hardware or when said hardware requires servicing.

How did you arrive at your current position? Was there a turning point in your career?

I'd say there were two key turning points.

The first occurred between my sophomore and junior years of college. I went to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), majoring in computer science with the intention of becoming a programmer. But after interning at a small manufacturing firm I discovered I could have a much greater impact — solving problems that the staff didn't even know they had — simply by walking around and listening to what they were doing. That semester, I transferred into the newly formed school of IT, with a focus in Management Information Systems. I was one of the first five graduates — getting a job within my new company's Business Continuity Planning department, rather than in IT itself.

The second pivot occurred while working at The Wallace Foundation, where I came in as a network systems engineer. I soon heard about an upcoming website redevelopment project, and volunteered my time. This was the first time The Wallace Foundation began work on a website with IT included at the start of a project, rather than waiting for the business requirements to be defined. The timing was critical — enabling me to exceed design expectations and ensure the site met the foundation's strategic goal of facilitating idea-sharing by increasing downloads of their research reports by over 2,000%. I quickly found myself working nearly full time for marketing.

"I quickly found myself working nearly full time for marketing."

How do you see business intelligence evolving, both technologically and organizationally?

Having started my career in IT and having seen one too many mission critical databases built in Excel, I believe that "Shadow IT" can be a very real problem, particularly when IT is held responsible for producing a single view of an organization’s data.

On the other hand, cloud computing platforms now make it easy for marketing to develop fully scalable and standardized systems, with very little technical expertise. That's beginning to alleviate many of IT's concerns about rogue development as it naturally breaks down data silos and exposes data that might otherwise have been lost.

For example, we use Salesforce.com to manage our prospecting, lead nurturing, sales support, recruiting and client databases. Want to know how many times we touch the average prospect before they make their first purchase — or how support influenced their purchasing behavior? Thanks to the shared platform, we can quickly and easily cross reference the information stored in each application — in real-time and without IT support — even though the reporting need wasn't realized until well after the applications were built.

"We can quickly and easily cross reference the information stored in each application — in real-time and without IT support."

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

To fully quantify your marketing efforts, make sure the data is pulled together by a team that understands both the technical nuances and "gotchas" of data collection as well as the aims of the marketing department. And, as hard as it is to say in today's data-driven environment, sometimes you still just have to trust your gut.

Any advice you would give to new marketing technologists?

Success as a marketing technologist often comes from solving problems that others might not even be aware of. But to do that, you need to get involved early in the process.

Take the time to really understand the challenges marketing is facing — and make the effort to explain how new tools or new approaches can simplify their lives or make their efforts more successful.

"Success as a marketing technologist often comes from solving problems that others might not even be aware of."

Thanks, Brian! You know, as an odd personal coincidence, my dad used to work with Thomas Publishing back in the 1970's. It's very cool to see how it's evolved 40 years later.

Bring your A-game to marketing technology (interview)

Earlier this week, I shared a presentation by marketing technologist Cleve Gibbon on building a marketing technology platform for engaging global brands. Today, I'm pleased to share with you our own interview with him.

Cleve is the Chief Technology Officer of Cognifide, a European digital technology agency that has built sites — or, as Cleve would insist, marketing technology platforms — for clients such as Skype and Virgin Media. He's a brilliant technologist with a Ph.D. in computer science. (His thesis was on bringing "techniques for building maintainable object-oriented software closer to the developer in the form of design heuristics.") And for the past 10 years he's applied his knowledge of technology towards building better marketing.

Cleve Gibbon, Chief Technology Officer, Cognifide

You've led marketing technology solutions for a number of major brands. Without revealing anything confidential, can you give us one or two examples that really highlight the impact marketing technology can have?

Our clients initially start off wanting a website, but we quickly re-establish what they actually need is a marketing technology platform. And by platform, I mean a reliable technical foundation and the supporting services required to execute marketing strategies that effective manage the end-to-end customer experience.

For one high traffic client, go-live saw a 28% uplift in conversion rates and by baking analytics in the core of the marketing solution, they are able to test customer experiences and continually optimise their marketing efforts.

For another client, we built and continue to manage their brand marketing platform across 14 different country sites. Their challenge was largely acquisitions and providing a clear communication channel for their customers to start and maintain a conversation with the right people within their organization. The results were astounding. Subsequent phases have been kicked off to widen the conversion part of the sales funnel. This requires marketing technology platform to integrate with CRM systems and social media channels to enable the client to have deeper and more relevant customer conversations.

"Our clients start off wanting a website, but we quickly re-establish that what they actually need is a marketing technology platform."

How did your career journey lead you here?

To fund my undergraduate education, I used to give training courses to technology companies. One day I was asked by the CTO of a security firm, "how can you tell if one piece of technology is designed better than another one." Back in 1994, there weren't too many answers to that question, so that became my doctorate.

I left academia and started a training company where for the next 10 years I built and supported numerous technology platforms, specialising in real-time trading systems for Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, ABN AMRO and USB. It was great timing and I was lucky to be part of some innovative development to build web-based solutions that manipulated massive data sets, shaping and using open standards that collaborated on interfaces and competed in their implementations. It was a busy time for the web.

"I was lucky to be part of some innovative development to build web-based solutions that manipulated massive data sets."

In early 2000, I was introduced to the creative agency Oyster Partners. This was my tipping point. Oyster Partners were building web sites for large global brands dipping their toe into raging digital waters with software teams that had an average age of 22 and the commensurate amount of experience. I loved the space. In 2006, I joined the executive board of Cognifide, where we are all ex Oyster Partners people.

Since you're based in London, can you give us a sense of the attitudes towards technology in marketing departments there? How have they changed in recent years?

We're lucky in that London is home to many of the world's leading global brands and creative / advertising agencies. We have a very mature digital industry that is lockstep with the evolution of effective marketing technology. Our edgy / quirky culture encourages marketers to be creative and innovative.

I've seen massive re-allocations of marketing spend taken from offline budgets and poured into digital initiatives. As marketing departments enter the digital space, the trend is to become more and more results focused.

The demand for what I call "A" class real-time data is staggering. "A" class data must be automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible, auditable and always available. There are trade-offs between the A's that ultimately impact the delivered results, but that's your job as a marketing technologist to understand and clearly communicate them back to the marketing department in a way that they can make informed and authoritative decisions.

"The demand for 'A' class data is staggering — automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible, auditable and always available."

As a consultant, you have the vantage point of working with many different marketing departments. What makes some companies more successful adopting marketing technology than others?

This answer talks somewhat to the previous point, but with a different A — that being Agile. Marketing technology enables marketing departments to be agile. Marketing agility gives businesses real-time customer insight and the ability to course correct their marketing strategies. The success stories come from those companies that go all out to embrace change. When executing marketing plans, it's not fire and forget, but more inspect and adapt. Expect small failures. Be prepared to continually inspect where you are and adapt your thinking, based upon a steady stream of marketing feedback.

Unfortunately, this is not for everyone. You may have an agile development team supporting a state-of-the-art marketing technology platform, but if the marketing department cannot be agile, those benefits will never be realized. Challenges range from changing traditional marketing attitudes to aligning external agencies (creative, advertising, pr) that are also non-agile nature. This has stunted many moves to adopt shorter marketing planning cycles and fed fear, uncertainty and doubt for agility in some companies.

"You may have a state-of-the-art marketing technology platform, but if the marketing department cannot be agile, those benefits will never be realized."

Agile marketing companies and/or those that want to become more agile, understand these challenges. We are entering into more and more discussions with these early adopters whose IT departments do not have agile mindset and/or the deep marketing technology expertise they need to execute profitable online.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

Marketing technology serves as the catalyst to companies that value planning over the plan. Confidence comes from small successes and well-understood failures. Try something. Fail fast. Inspect and adapt. Rinse and repeat. This is the very essence of an organization that places optimization at the centre of an agile business culture and leverages marketing technology to the hilt.

Are there any marketing technology innovations that you're particularly excited about these days?

Honestly, no. When you take a look at the technology building blocks, nothing much has changed in terms of the APIs, standards, security and data formats recently. These are all well known to the technology industry. However, what does blow my mind are the unlimited number of ways that you can assemble these building blocks within the marketing space to solve some previously intractable business problems.

"What blows my mind are the unlimited number of ways that you can assemble these building blocks within the marketing space."

For example, the ability to track lifecycle of a prospect through the sales funnel, across multiple channels and digital media, taking every opportunity to localize and personalise the customer experience by targeting content based up their behavioral profile, is nothing short of breath taking.

Customer experience management (CEM) plays a big part in driving key marketing technology innovations for our clients. However, the flip side of CEM is Author Experience Management. Marketing departments needs authors to continually create, curate and deliver messages, typically through a content management system. Author Experience (AX) is a critical part of a marketing communications plan that is often overlooked. A marketing technology platform that invests in enhancing the AX enables marketers to focus upon executing and monitoring their campaigns instead of managing tools not equipped deal with their authoring needs.

"Author Experience (AX) is a critical part of a marketing communications plan that is often overlooked."

It always brings a smile to my face when I have an insightful web experience where a company correctly infers my online intentions. At that point, I tip my hat to the marketing technologist that is clearly one step ahead of their target audience.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

You're expected to know that your customers don't know what they don't know. The best marketing technologists can deftly navigate through the noisy world of customer wants to surface their actual needs. Although the aim is to drive online revenue, focus upon providing solutions to real people problems, however big or small they may be.

People your products/services in the most compelling ways in markets that you're perceived in as a supportive influence and not the salesmen. Only then provide a marketing platform that does everything possible to facilitate that 3-way conversation between you, your customers, and the community.

Learn your trade. Understand your weaknesses. Form internal alliances and external partnerships with people that can fill those gaps. Marketing technology is a big place. The fastest moving target I've ever tried to hit. Get help. Support others. And be the best!

"The best marketing technologists can deftly navigate through the noisy world of customer wants to surface their actual needs."

Thanks, Cleve — awesome, applicable, and alliterated. And very inspiring.

To marketing, then IT, and back again (interview)

For this week's marketing technologist interview, we move in-house to talk with someone who's balanced the relationship between marketing and IT on the front-line. In fact, he's worked for marketing, then IT, and then marketing again — all with the same mission. I'm thrilled to have Eric Long, an experienced online marketer, information architect, and web strategist share his perspective with us.

Eric is the Senior Manager of E-Business for the Decor Global Business Unit of Newell Rubbermaid. Newell Rubbermaid has 13 such business units, each with its own marketing department. Decor's brands include Levolor and Kirsch (window blinds, shades, draperies, and drapery hardware) and Amerock (cabinet hardware).

Eric also publishes ebusinessblog.org, which has more great ideas on this topic.

Eric Long, Senior Manager of E-Business, Newell Rubbermaid

First, how did you end up at the intersection of marketing and technology? What did your career path look like?

I think it's important to note that I really got into computers with Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) before I started working professionally. Networking computers so people in remote locations could carry on conversations fascinated me for some reason.

When it came time to choosing a college major, I knew I didn't want to "fix computers" but wanted to work in a field related to computers and the conversations they helped facilitate. This was very difficult for college advisers to grasp, and at the time the options were limited because technology was so foreign to many people. Computer science was "too techy" for me and a business degree was not techy enough. Then I stumbled upon management information systems and realized this 50-50 blend of technology and business was the perfect degree for me.

I spent my first 9 years working professionally for a small production and interactive agency doing work as an IT administrator and an interactive project manager. It was there that I learned that the world was not black and white and that I needed to move into the "gray area" — as I was told on numerous occasions by my heavily marketing-oriented colleagues.

It was through my time at this agency that I learned the value of the end-user experience and how, above anything else, this was the single, most important quality to a product.

"It was through my time at [an] agency that I learned the value of the end-user experience."

5 years ago I began working for the Decor Global Business Unit in Newell Rubbermaid as a web marketing manager and reported to the director of consumer marketing. I was tasked with launching our business into e-commerce on a new platform with a new shopping experience.

Can you tell me more about the relationship between IT and marketing in that e-commerce launch?

At the time, our e-business department was split up in 3 different departments:

• marketing
• IT infrastructure
• R&D/engineering

This silo'd approach was a result of small teams forming within specific department silos that needed "systems-related" work to be performed for projects.

After 2 years and a successful launch into e-commerce, it made the most sense to bring these 3 silo'd functions together. I was appointed the senior manager of IT Applications and managed the newly-formed team while reporting to the CFO. During this time we handled all IT-related requests that pertained to applications in the business unit (intranets, custom development, customer systems, internal systems, websites, etc.). The project list was long and extremely backlogged.

Another 2 years passed, and the organizational structure changed again—a new executive team was formed as the business was shifting from "fix" to "growth" mode. This time I moved back over to the marketing department with largely the same team members (and approval to expand the team for growth), and I would now report to the VP of Marketing. At the end of the day, each project my team works on has a direct impact on end-user experience, and we used this as a means to justify the move to marketing.

"Each project my team works on has a direct impact on end-user experience, and we used this as a means to justify the move to marketing."

For the marketing department to not have any managing authority over such an important strategic component (end-user experience) of our business would be a problem. IT should not be responsible for defining how customers or consumers experience our B2C or B2B systems. By realigning our team in marketing, we set up our business unit for long-term project alignment. We then shed our team of the list of internal projects (intranets, custom development, etc.) that were not impacting customers/consumers.

How does the team look today? What's under your e-busines umbrella?

At our Decor business unit, we break down e-business into the following 5 functions for which my team is responsible for:

1. Business Intelligence & Web Analytics
2. Content & UX
3. Application & Development
4. E-Marketing & Interactive Marketing
5. Merchandising & Conversion

I report to the VP of Marketing and manage a staff of 17 marketing and technical team members. Our in-house expertise is heavily Application & Development, related with a developing competency in BI & Analytics and Content & UX. We get agency help across all 5 functions depending on workload.

The types of projects vary considerably when the scope can span these 5 functions. Some projects only touch one function, other projects touch all five. Examples of projects we're currently working on with marketing technology:

Redesigning the online merchandising experience based on web analytics data, voice of consumer data, and segmentation research (executed by our Consumer Insights department).

Leveraging our B2C e-commerce experience for B2B e-commerce. Gone are the days where B2B portals were purely functional and companies could get by on a poor experience. Everybody uses Facebook and Google, therefore everybody expects this type of ease-of-use with their web applications.

"Gone are the days when B2B portals were purely functional. Everybody expects ease-of-use with their web applications."

Since you've worked for both IT and marketing, what suggestions would you give for optimizing the relationship between those two departments?

I honestly believe the marketing department requires a dedicated marketing technology team. This is essentially what we have in our e-business team.

The main problem with IT is that it has so many customers to satisfy in addition to outside customers and consumers: internal stakeholders, internal projects, etc. As a result, a value equation is often used to determine prioritization of IT projects. The fundamental flaw with this is that by always focusing on the biggest ROI projects — which on paper, makes sense — you can easily miss the low hanging fruit that would drastically improve the end user experience for a customer or consumer. Sometimes, it's the little details that matter most.

Since it probably isn't an option for many businesses to have a dedicated e-business team, then you need someone who can serve as this bridge between the worlds of marketing and IT. Nothing infuriates an IT team more when a marketing representative can't "talk the talk" and requirements are so broadly scoped that it leaves the IT team to interpret the intent.

"You need someone who can serve as this bridge between the worlds of marketing and IT."

Conversely, nothing infuriates a marketing team more than when an IT team under-delivers on the end-product because they didn't capture the essence of what was needed. In the end, no one is at fault because IT delivered exactly what the marketing department requested.

If you could give 30 seconds of wisdom on marketing technology to the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, what would you say?

The online channel is not a zero-sum game; distribution is still distribution. Consumers buy where it's convenient for them and they don't care about your channel conflicts.

Your call center is not the first place a consumer will go to report a problem anymore, so don't rely on it as your only means of measuring the voice of consumer.

Any advice you would give to up-and-coming marketing technologists?

Spend time working for an agency so you get a healthy cross-section of projects and customers to get a feel for the type of work you like to do. Don't be afraid to work in IT if there is a rotational program available where you are.

And finally, work in an industry you are passionate about. Your work is much more rewarding and you are infinitely better at it when you are passionate about the topic.

"Your work is much more rewarding and you are infinitely better at it when you are passionate about the topic."

Thanks, Eric!