CMO’s are having a hard time adapting to the pressure’s of the new social media tools and platforms.
Paul Dunay posts the reasons why CMO are under pressure:
Technology complexity: With the myriad of new technologies and channels being introduced seemingly daily, the marketer has to double as a marketing technologist; further, the ground is always shifting underneath him or her given the birth and demise of new platforms to reach new audiences. If they fail to keep up with this ever-changing state, they are seen as “antiquated.”
Budgets: Marketers have been asked to do more with less for years now. And despite best attempts, they cannot produce earth-shattering results with small staffs and few dollars; they are often released for underperforming.
The role of marketing in general is under attack: There exists a large group of voices that suggest that marketing is an imprecise discipline. Build a good product, spend a little bit of money on “virality” and then you can avoid keeping a big marketing team, they say. This overhang affects the ability of marketers to develop the gravity they need within the organization.
And why social data might just save the day for the CMO’s job”
There is no way to get real-time feedback and deep data-driven insights before the marketing campaigns occur. In most of its forms, traditional marketing follows a linear, serial process. The marketer had an idea, they hired an agency, the agency built a creative treatment and handed the media component over to another division, the media agency purchased the media, the advertising runs and everyone waits hopefully for the results. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy and when relying on it, we are often sorely disappointed and as a result CMOs are let-go because their crystal balls weren’t functioning.
The business of marketing execution for CMO’s is being impacted by the business of what I call Social Media Infrastructure. Incumbant companies from the post dot com bubble are pivoting or selling. Just this week Buddy Media was sold to Salesforce.com. While new emerging leaders like Thismoment.com are building scalable marketing infrastructure platforms that provide a direct business model for “smart CMOs”. We saw this in the Hunger Games example which recently won the nomination for MTV awards.
Prediction: The middleman in advertising and marketing will soon disappear. Words like GRPs (gross rating points), email marketing, and pageviews will be a thing of the past.
Technical Prediction: Unstructured data will emerge as the disruption..see this post
New products that automate Big Data complexity on commodity hardware? What if they truly democratize access to data and analytics with solutions that are “good enough” and at a price point that brings in new customers . This is classic disruptive innovation where low end, good enough software and systems eat away at the functionality of existing high end scale-up architectures.
