A conversation about growth

#businessofmarketing

A conversation about growth with: Bob Liodice, CEO, The ANA; Marla Kaplowitz, CEO, The 4A’s; Randall Rothenberg, CEO, the IAB

We sat for an hour to talk about the business of marketing and about growth. Here’s what they said.

Big picture

·      For most Fortune 500 companies growth remains slow, the strong economy disguises that fact but can’t conceal it.

·      Every CMO is under enormous pressure to simultaneously drive the top line and reduce cost.

o  Investment is what you spend of the portion of savings your function gets to retain.

·      In most large companies the convergence of the CMO and CIO roles has gone less far than many expected; the functions collaborate but remain organizationally and functionally distinct.

·      Data and its application remain a hot topic but few marketers are seeing yield on that investment at a scale or speed that matches their initial expectations

·      The agency community is under every bit as much pressure as the marketer community

o  The imperative is to diversify services, to become expert quickly and to persuade marketers that the value of that expertise exceeds the perceived savings from in-housing.

·      For both marketers and agencies the evolution of the talent pool is crucial but few are coping with the cost and pace of change. Talent is not moving at the velocity of technology or at the velocity of consumer behavioral change

·      All sides believe in the value of long term brand building but also that there is no long term without short term success.

The great disruption – a three-part tale of direct brands, service evolution and media supply

1.      The disruptive nature of direct brands is a function of a rentable supply chain which reduces costs, speeds up go to market and increases responsiveness to changes in demand. Direct brand operators to be data ninjas.

o  Direct brands massively multiply consumer choice and erode category leaders taking multiple thin slices of market share

o  Category leading ‘legacy’ enterprises have mostly responded by buying disruptors in the hope of ‘platforming’ them for growth on existing infrastructure

2.      Direct brands go to market differently, agency services have to evolve to meet their needs. Speed, accuracy, data literacy and efficiency are central. By getting better at all these things agencies will serve all their clients better.

o  In-housing remains in its infancy and it’s most clear that most marketers are motivated by control of contracts, data and transparency as opposed to actual in-house implementation

3.      A huge challenge to all marketers remains the rapid loss of high attention opportunities to deliver commercial messaging.

o  It’s complex navigating a world that has moved from reach and impact without precision to one of precision with less obvious reach and impact

Lastly…a word on business to business

·      For many B2B marketers disruption is every bit as dramatic as it is in consumer marketing

·      ‘Mainframe to cloud’ is the B2B parallel of the direct brand revolution

·      The good news for B2B marketers is that they have better opportunities to leverage data and technology to find and nurture leads as it’s a natural evolution of relationship structures that rarely existed in consumer marketing.