Chief Marketing Technologist

Marketers are less statistical than, um, statisticians

The Corporate Executive Board had an eye-catching post on the HBR blog recently, Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test. They begin:

The big-data explosion is driving a shift away from gut-based decision making. Marketing in particular is feeling the pressure to embrace new data-driven customer intelligence capabilities. No wonder a strong appetite for data is one of the most sought-after qualities in new marketers. And yet, a recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition — while the few who do use data aggressively for the most part do it badly.

We'll save the debate about big data vs. small data for another day. This article nonetheless makes several important points:

• In today's volatile environment, where customer behaviors are changing rapidly with new technologies, judgement from past experience is increasingly unreliable.
• Many marketing "dashboards" are tuned to low-level metrics, such as clicks and open rates, that aren't tied to "more important measures such as customer loyalty or lifetime value" — which can result in misguided incentives.
• The data explosion has created a lot of noise — which can result in "endless fire drills" — and that a relatively small number of marketers are good at filtering it.
• Top-performing marketers today, as rated by their managers, have these qualities: "comfort with ambiguity, ability to ask strategic questions based on data, and narrow focus on higher-order goals."

For that last point, I find myself recalling Avinash Kaushik's keynote from the other week, that the problem is very rarely data, and that marketers would be well-advised to keep remarkable customer experiences at the top of their priorities.

However, I do have to take one exception to the CEB's post. They lead with an indictment against marketers not being statistically savvy. They asked five statistics questions, and 44% of those interviewed got four or more answers wrong; only 6% got all five right. They followed that by stating, "it didn't surprise us that just 5% of marketers own a statistics text book." That sounds really bad, doesn't it?

But ironically, this strikes me as a little fast-and-loose statistically itself.

Without giving us the questions, we have to rely on the CEB's private assessment that they were "basic to intermediate." But more importantly, there's no baseline to compare against. How many of those questions would software engineers have gotten wrong? How many would professional scientists have missed? Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman had a famous study of The Law of Small Numbers, showing that even professional researchers who rely on statistics for their careers are prone to bad statistical judgement, even with relatively simple questions.

Similarly, how many people in Fortune 1000 companies own a statistics text book? If the answer overall is, say, 2%, then you could make the statement that marketers are 150% more likely to own a statistics text book — funny how putting something in bold makes it seem more true, eh? — which frames things in an entirely different light.

Of course, I believe that marketers should increase their fluency with statistics and statistical thinking. Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a great place to start. Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics is another must-read.

But if you're going to ask marketers to think more carefully about data, it might help to lead by example.

Mr./Ms. CMO -- tear down these walls!

Three separate worlds:

• Paid media such as advertising and sponsorships.
• Earned media such as Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, search engine rankings, and every other review and comment that other people make about you.
• Owned media such as your web site, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps, your brand's Facebook page, your YouTube channel, and so on.

Well, for marketers they've been three separate worlds. Typical marketing org charts and agency/vendor boundaries sharply delineate these domains, often with electrified fences.

But to prospects and customers, there are no boundaries. It's as effortless as crossing state lines on a long road trip. There's just a natural flow between brand awareness and interest and the experience that follows — whether it's on your web site, in your store, or via some other digital or physical space that you have responsibility for.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but these crossings are where most companies screw the pooch.

Your audience's hopes and expectations are ignited out in the open worlds of paid and earned media, and as quick-as-a-click they're in your owned media world, ready to have those hopes and expectations fulfilled. Oh, and they'll judge you mercilessly in earned media accordingly. Because to them, you only have one identity across all these media: you are "you." And if "you" appear schizophrenic, that's bad.

The underlying organizational walls between those three worlds — and their various inner compartments — may be invisible to your audience, but the effects of them are quite palpable. They manifest themselves as disconnects. A leads to B, but B doesn't follow from A.

You make a promise in a Google search ad, fail to follow through with it on your landing page, outright contradict it deeper in your web site, while promoting a better deal on your Facebook page and letting your mobile web site languish with an offer from 6 months ago. Heaven help the pour soul who then reaches out to your brand's Twitter account for clarification.

Customers don't see the electrified fences, but they feel them.

As the number of moving parts in each of these domains multiply and become ever more sophisticated, these unpleasant shocks become more frequent. And to the customer, whose expectations are rising, they're becoming more annoying too. You're being held to a digital experience standard set by technological wizards at Apple, Facebook, and state-of-the-art web start-ups.

There's really only one solution: marketing leadership must unite these media in their vision and day-to-day operations. It's daunting, but inevitable in an age where media has already converged for your audience.

There are not three worlds. There's only one: converged media.

So says a brilliant — and free — Altimeter report titled The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media by Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang. If you haven't already, get it now.

They describe the forces behind this convergence, the problems that current marketing organizations facing in adapting to it, and a number of good recommendations for how to start addressing it. Interestingly, I found them making the case for agile marketing without explicitly using that term. But as you can see in their converged media workflow in the diagram above, real-time measurement and iteration are at the core of converged media operations.

If converged media is the "what," then agile marketing is the "how."

My column this month on Search Engine Land, Framing The Bigger Picture Of Landing Pages, focuses on the implications of this convergence in the context of paid search and owned landing pages. It's some of the most exciting efforts happening in the conversion optimization space these days, and it's all about improving internal coordination to achieve a smoother external experience. The same kind of opportunity exists at the intersection of all the other marketing silos. (This was the same essence of my presentation: everything is marketing, everyone must be agile.)

The gauntlet has been officially thrown down: Mr./Ms. CMO, tear down these walls!

Before your competitors beat you to it.

25% of these firms have a chief technologist in marketing

Julie Schwartz, SVP of research for the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, shared some fascinating results from a recent survey on marketing transformation they conducted with the following companies:

They asked marketers in these firms about a number of different roles — community manager, social engagement leader, chief content officer, data scientist, and chief technologist:

• Do you have this role now?
• Do you expect to have this role in the next 1-3 years?
• Do you not expect to have this role?
• Don't know.

Two numbers about the "chief technologist" role surprised me.

First, 25% of these marketers claim they have this role today, which is a larger percentage than I would have guessed. Although there's been a lot of advocacy for such technology leadership within marketing — certainly on this blog, but also from many of the major analyst houses — my impression is that we're still at the very early stages of this organizational transformation. The fact that 25% of the companies above have already implemented such a role is, I feel, a pretty major sign of momentum.

On the other hand, 52% of these marketers don't expect to have this role, at least not within the next 1-3 years. That number is also much larger than I would have guessed, given all the influx of technology into the marketing department and all the talk about technology budgets moving to marketing (or, maybe more accurately, new technology budgets growing in marketing).

Why don't they expect to have a technologist role? Do they not see the need? Or they see the need, but don't think they'll fill it? Or is the need being sufficiently addressed outside of the department, either by the IT department or outside vendors or agencies? Or is there another name for this role? ("No, we don't have a chief technologist, but we do have digital platform manager, a head of web development, etc.") Or are we just so early in this technological transformation of marketing that the concepts and culture of "technologists" still feel foreign to most marketing departments?

Here's a chart of the results from these roles, courtesy of the ITSMA:

If you're interested in these findings, Julie will be presenting a web briefing at the end of this month: The New Skills Crisis in Marketing: Why Your Next Marketers Won't Come from Marketing.

Godin's hierarchy of business to business needs

The problem with the Chicago school of economics isn't so much its belief in rational decision-making — we can save for another day the computational complexity arguments against such precision in our thinking. Rather, it's that it is too easy to misjudge what people are optimizing in their decisions.

How many times have you looked at something a large organization does and remarked to yourself, "Yikes, that seems a little irrational."

The irony is that there is rational decision-making happening in a lot of those scenarios. But the decisions are made by individuals who are naturally optimizing their own success and happiness — which all too often diverges from the higher order function of the organization as a whole (i.e., maximizing shareholder value). This is why truly great organizations work so hard at aligning the interests of their employees with their mission, and it's definitely not easy.

Seth Godin wrote a terrific post this morning on a hierarchy of business to business needs that proposes an outline of the needs B2B buyers must satisfy when considering making a purchase:

1. Avoid risk
2. Avoid hassle
3. Gain praise
4. Gain power
5. Have fun
6. Make a profit

Note that "make a profit" is dead last.

I found this to be so right on — and so important for B2B marketers to keep in mind — that I decided to sketch a quick illustration of it above. (My apologies to Seth Godin who certainly deserves a better illustrator than me.)

Reminds me a lot of the groundbreaking research that Gord Hotchkiss covered in The BuyerSphere Project, studying how businesses buy from other businesses in the age of the digital marketplace. (Excellent — and free — book if you haven't read it yet.)

Of course, it's not just useful for B2B marketers to keep this in mind. The real challenge is managing the way this stack of needs is entangled in your own organization's mission.

CMOs are the new CIOs -- crazy or prescient?

A headline on Forbes caught my eye the other day: Are CMOs the New CIOs? It cites the Gartner study following the money from IT to marketing and concludes (emphasis added is my own):

The convergence between marketing and technology is undeniable, and it's still in its infancy. Imagine a world where a brand's success will ultimately come down to how well it can handle and leverage an infinite network of relationships and market interactions. That's where this is going. Managing the network will be the key to new innovations, sustaining customers and creating a responsive nature for doing business. The technology infrastructure for connecting and distribution information is the linchpin to it all.

The question is are marketers up to the task. And eventually, if the CMO ultimately morphs into a CIO.

I tweeted the article, and Peter Kretzman — an outspoken CIO/CTO whose perspective I respect at many levels — replied back how crazy that was, calling it "baitful."

He's right: it is baitful. And, if you think about the current state of CIOs and CMOs, it's certainly easy enough to dismiss this oversimplified proclamation as crazy. Even I — a vocal advocate of growing technology leadership within the marketing department — admit that the headline seems over the top.

Until one day, suddenly, it may not be.

As a big fan of Clay Christensen's model for describing disruptive innovation, I am amazed at how often this pattern seems to occur:

1. Everyone is happy with the status quo.
2. A new innovation appears that threatens the status quo, but it only seems usable for "low end" applications.
3. The status quo leaders laugh at that: "It will never be good enough to handle real applications."
4. But that new innovation continues to improve, steadily climbing up the performance curve to bigger and more important applications.
5. The status quo leaders continue to retreat further up the complexity curve: "But it can't do this!"
6. Eventually, the old status quo is squeezed into a niche and the new innovation dominates.

If you take the notion of marketers running their own technology as an "innovation" — enabled by the explosion of connectivity and computing through the cloud and a massive wave of marketing technology entrepreneurship — the narrative sure starts to sound like this pattern.

"Ha, it's crazy to have marketers in charge of their own technology. Okay, well, maybe just let them handle their own ad networks. Okay, maybe just their own social media tools — those don't require any heavy-lifting IT muscle. Hmm, they want API access to the CRM? How did they learn about APIs? Well, okay, they can have those under the following conditions. Wow, they built a mobile app? But the real online experience is in our data center... well, okay, they can use that hosted web content management system, less headache for us to deal with patches. But the business intelligence we get from analyzing all the data collected is... hrr, they're experimenting with Google BigQuery for that?"

For marketing-IT evolution to play out like that, five things must happen:

1. Technology for marketers must get easier to use.
2. Technology for marketers must become more essential to their core mission.
3. Marketing must have more technical talent directly within its ranks.
4. Marketing leaders must become more savvy at technology management.
5. The money for marketing technology must come directly from marketing.

All five of these seem to be progressing — in some cases quite rapidly. "Marketing leaders must become more savvy at technology management" is probably the slowest to develop so far. CIOs have a big advantage over most CMOs in that regard. But the incentives are there for CMOs to get smarter about that dimension of their domain, and subsequent generations of CMOs may possess such perspective natively. Their steps up Christensen's performance curve might be small, but they are moving upward.

What was laughable yesterday, and crazy today, might yet be the new status quo in the future.

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... ;-)

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.

What do you call a marketing technologist?

There's a punchline in there somewhere, but I'm partially serious.

While everyone is coming around to the merging of marketing and technology/IT — and the value of hybrid roles to lead and operate at that intersection — the titles that people use for these roles vary tremendously.

I like the phrase chief marketing technologist (a biased choice, I admit). My annual survey of marketing technology memes for 2012 favored the titles director of marketing technology, marketing technology manager, and vice president of marketing technology. The agency world favors the term chief creative technologist. Forrester advocates for a chief marketing technology strategist.

Earlier this week, a vice president at Microsoft Advertising proposed another variation: Chief Information Marketing Officer (CIMO). From his blog post:

Lines between CIO and CMO are blurring. Today's CMO needs to view technology as both a delivery tool and as an analytics/measurement tool. The CIO needs to think about build-out Big Data and actionable analytics capabilities to support marketing. Technology is the bridge between the two functions — hence a new title: Chief Information Marketing Officer (CIMO).

Conceptually, that's right on. As far as titles go, I think four word titles have one word too many. But that's just personal preference. Choose title inspires you and your organization — it's the mission that matters, not the label.

But if you want to construct your own title, here's an automata diagram for generating one:

How many possible titles can this produce? Your choices: 7 rank qualifiers, 6 ranks, 3 rank conjunctions, 8 function adjectives, 11 functions, and 10 role nouns. Plus you could have multiple function adjectives and functions -- say two of each, so an extra 7 adjectives and 10 functions, plus 2 optional function conjunctions.

7 x 6 x 3 x 8 x 11 x 10 x 7 x 10 x 2 = 15,523,200 possible titles.

Want three functions adjectives and three functions? Multiply by another 6 x 9 x 2 for a total of 1,676,505,600. More than a billion.

Senior Vice President of Creative Technology and Computational Marketing Platforms? It's plausible.