CMOs Shouldn’t Buy Tech, Ever!
Shelly Palmer
Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University
According to Gartner, 2017 is the year CMOs (chief marketing officers) will buy more tech than CIOs (chief information officers). This is truly unfortunate. CMOs should never buy tech, ever! Buying tech should be left to technical managers who understand the technical debt each “bolted-on solution” is likely to cause. A quick tech overview of a typical (albeit oversimplified and incomplete) marketing tech (mar-tech) stack illustrates the problem:
Contacts
Contact Acquisition, Nurturing, Retention, Customer Success
Connections
Social, Websites, Email, Interactive, Remarketing
Content
Content Creation, Content Optimization and Scoring, Scheduling and Distribution
Customer Data & Analytics
CRM, Analytics Platforms, Insight Tools, Demand Generation
Collaboration
Shared Workspace, Productivity, Internal Communications Tools
A Quick Test
Rather than put the names of the most common software solutions in a pretty graphic above, I simply described the functions of the tools in this approximation of a typical mar-tech stack. Take a few minutes and fill in the names of the best practices, most interoperable (with your corporate tech stack) tools for each of the layers. Obviously, I can’t check your answers here, but if you enter your answers in my handy online form, I’ll happily grade your homework. (BTW, I don’t sell hardware or software so this is not an infomercial or native advertising, or other selfishness shrouded in altruism device. It’s simply a way for you to test your mar-tech stack knowledge against industry standards.)
It’s Hard Because It’s Not Your Job
To rephrase an old maxim, “A tech stack is only as strong as its weakest layer.” Choosing compatible (or interoperable), continuously improvable tools requires a knowledge of systems architecture that few CMOs possess. In practice, few CIOs possess the knowledge to craft a complete marketing tech stack. This is the bastion of highly specialized, independent systems engineers. Why independent? Simply because as independents, their only agenda is making sure you have a maximally functional, super-efficient stack.
Where Are the Buzzwords?
You will notice that the buzzwords Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), open source, and Bots are all missing from the sample mar-tech stack above. They absolutely have a place, but unless you know exactly how and why, you should not be directly specifying (or even making decisions about) which tools are best for you. Marketers should not fall prey to marketing.
Software Is a Religion
Conventional wisdom tells us the average lifespan of a CMO is 18-24 months. Which means most CMOs are infants (corporately speaking) and will likely inherit a pre-existing marketing tech stack replete with legacy hardware and software.
This is where it gets really tricky. Software is faith-based. It is, for all intents and purposes, a religion. There is the church of Microsoft, the church of Google, of Salesforce, of Amazon, of IBM, etc. No matter the abstraction layer of the stack, someone schooled in the art will have made previous decisions based on what they believed to be the one and only true doctrine.
Are you a believer in the same doctrine? The cliché answer is, “I’m tech agnostic.” You may be, but your legacy tech stack certainly is not. Especially if corporate IT helped design it.
Of Course There’s a Solution
It’s time to reorganize your marketing department. First, hire a computer scientist who understands marketing. You can teach an engineer about marketing in a few months, but you cannot teach a marketer about computers without having the marketer matriculate through a college-level computer science curriculum.
You’ll push back now and say that becoming a marketer takes at least that much education plus years of experience. I agree. But it is far easier to explain the marketing functions you wish to automate to a computer scientist than it is to teach computer science to a marketer.
Next, organize your marketing department into mar-tech teams. Pairing full-time marketers with full-time marketing-oriented computer scientists has been extremely effective in reducing time from needs analysis to deployment. We’ve also seen it dramatically reduce both capex and opex. A nontechnical marketer will ask pure marketing questions, and a marketing-savvy computer scientist will devise technical solutions accordingly. The results we’ve seen from these types of pairings have been nothing short of magical.
This Is Complicated
Combining the accelerating pace of technological change with the glacial pace of big corporate timelines is disastrous. By the time you get something designed and approved, the technology has already evolved. This will always be true for some organizations. But you can choose a different path. You can adapt your marketing department by inventing a new breed of marketing technologists.
Oh, and don’t forget to do your homework.
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About Shelly Palmer
Named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Technology, Shelly Palmer is CEO of The Palmer Group, a strategic advisory, technology solutions and business development practice focused at the nexus of media and marketing with a special emphasis on machine learning and data-driven decision-making. He is Fox 5 New York's on-air tech and digital media expert, writes a weekly column for AdAge,and is a regular commentator on CNBC and CNN. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com or subscribe to our daily email https://ow.ly/WsHcb
Tech Strategy | Digital Acceleration | Value Based Delivery & Flow Management | Business Transformation | Enterprise Agility | Business Growth, Performance & Innovation Leader
7 年Somewhat agree, as a new breed of marketing technologist involved with digital transformation, what I always struggle with is the buying decisions of marketers who chase tactical or shiny new stuff and duplicate functional or un leveraged capabilities of existing tech - a partnership is required in the multi cloud and API economies which many old skool techies and CIO don't get either - so its a win win, especially when proving the ROI and reducing technical debt overheads( sorry I meant the hoards of consultants managing your account) of your mar/adtech stack - also depends on the size if the business aka enterprise solution at scale or small medium - bottom line - a select group of heads make better decisions
B.S.
Shelly, Catchy title but never say never is my motto here. If a fine arts grad as you are, can advise CMOs and other marketing leaders on how to purchase technology, why should they be so dependent on computer scientists? Professions change with the adoption of technology. Having sold millions in data science and data engineering products and solutions to senior Fortune 50 executives for a living, I can tell you that the best of them are becoming pretty technical. At very successful and leading consumer companies, there is not much difference anymore between a CMO and a CDO (Chief Data Officer) for instance. Furthermore, young graduates are already showing up with dual emphasis in engineering and marketing from the best schools worldwide and by the thousands as far as I can see. Finally, consumer marketing strategies and tactics are complex and I have seen many PHD-holding data scientists or star data engineering architects struggle while trying to serve CMOs and their teams. Would love to to get your feedback. Dan
Strategic, Creative, Data-driven Marketing Revenue Executive (B2B, B2C)
7 年Marketers can and should purchase software, there's just a few tricks to getting it right: (1) partner with IT, leverage their knowledge and respect their input, they're protecting the enterprise; (2) staff it right, you "buy it," you have to maintain, integrate (often), support and communicate net new features; (3) anticipate and plan for how technology adoption changes your marketing organization. Technology in the marketing organization changes everyone's job.
11K+ | India's Top 5 Rising Entrepreneurs | Ai Enabler | Founder | Consultant & Advisor | Automation Expert | LION | Building the Future of Authentic Business Expansion
7 年There is no shortage of Technical Marketers in the present workforce. Basically I meet a lot of people who did their computer science engineering first and then got a job. Being stuck in the pipeline of IT firm they decided to go for an MBA..and guess what they select their major as Marketing and then the story begins..they no longer want to do technical things but if you motivate and emphasize that both their skill matter then you will have the perfect combination. Being an engineer first and MBA later I have become a CMO and I spearhead both the Technical and Marketing departments. I have deep knowledge in both spheres and can make absolutely fantastic selection of any solution that works for both Technical and Marketers equally