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Guest blog post by Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO, ion interactive
I know, there are a lot of new “chiefs” being proposed these days. Chief Content Officer. Chief Customer Officer. Chief Revenue Officer. And now a Chief Marketing Technology Officer? Is there anyone left in the organization who isn’t a chief?
But set aside titles for a moment. These new leadership roles aren’t really about proliferating the upper ranks of marketing management. They’re about recognizing that marketing has been changing dramatically — and that it’s time for the marketing organization to adapt its leadership structure accordingly.
Arguably, the massive influx of technology into marketing has been one of the most overwhelming disruptions of the past 10 years. The spectrum of new marketing technologies — bid management, content management, conversion optimization, web analytics, marketing automation, social media monitoring, etc. — has delivered tremendous innovation to our work. As marketers, we’re starting to feel like Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” Except with a laptop and an Internet connection.
But for many marketers, the great power of this technology has also come with great frustration. While the high-level principles of marketing are the same as they ever were — engage your audience with a compelling story and a differentiated experience — the mechanics of executing in the technical domains of software, networks and data can make you feel like a stranger in a strange land. And while there are guides to this terra incognito in the IT department, they often have differing priorities, schedules, and budgets. They often don’t understand why marketing wants what it does.
The solution: marketing must take control of its own technological destiny. Not everyone in marketing needs to become a technologist — just as not everyone in marketing needs to be a “creative.” But marketing should have its own technologists on staff, charged with the mission of making the technical machinery of modern marketing hum. They handle the nitty-gritty of configuration, scripting, and data integration. But they do this technical work clearly in the context of marketing objectives, seeking new ways to optimize the CMO’s goals with the tools of their trade. They aim to make the whole of all these marketing technologies greater than the sum of their parts.
A chief marketing technology officer (CTMO) — use whatever label you prefer — is simply the lead marketing technologist, organizing and managing that team. He or she reports to the CMO, not the CIO. Again, this is ultimately a marketing responsibility. There should be collaboration with IT, of course, assuring that marketing fully leverages its infrastructure and complies with technical governance standards. But collaborating is better than being solely dependent.
This Thursday, Marcus Tewksbury, VP of Strategy and Consulting at Experian Marketing Services, and I will present a webinar on this topic. We’d love to have you join the discussion.
This guest post was written by Scott Brinker, the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive who blogs on the intersection of marketing and technology at Chief Marketing Technologist. You can follow him on Twitter @chiefmartec.
