How Marketing Became The Brand Sausage Making Department.

As the marketing industry has grown increasingly digital, this crisis has forced brands, companies and leadership teams to reimagine what the role of covid disruption has meant to the business of tomorrow.

The demands and expectations of CMOs continue to evolve at an accelerated rate.

From what I can evidence prior to this crisis it seemed that CMO's and marketing teams over the past decade simply became the digital bullhorn of the company and not much more. 

Prior to this pandemic marketing communications should have been about 8% of the marketing function’s duties. 

However, it increasingly seemed to take up almost all of it along with a sizable budget spend - something that's also got 50%-75% ad fraud built in.

As such marketers were becoming more and more responsible for the communication aspects of the marketing mix – with 'paid' social media, PR, CRM and ecommerce all increasingly under their control as the other tactical and strategic challenges dissipate.

If this is the environment that today's CMO and marketing teams have 'earned their craft' then how do they fit into today's world?

In a post Covid advertising budget scarce world just how do they and their teams stay in the role, and relevant to the company?

Instead of being the marketing leaders that helped identify new markets and product development opportunities it seems they spent most of the time blowing large ad spend budgets and spewing creative vomit to feed the fraud ridden ad-tech platform frenzy. 

These are the sausage machine platforms that enabled brands to get those spammy adverts into the digital ecosystem at lightning speed with something that simply resulted in advertising blizzards, and managed to piss us all off. 

Today's Senior Marketing CV's are littered with descriptions of 'paid media' digital communications expertise and the awesome results they've delivered - seems very few have ever had shit results BTW!.

This is as a result of years of internal promotions of junior marketing executives into senior marketing people who today know very little about brand marketing other than deploying 'paid media' bullhorn campaigns.

Worse still is the board believing that this is 'marketing' - when in reality is its an echo chamber of what they have always done, and simply stifles growth and innovation. 

It certainly seems like business has lost sight of the wider role of the CMO's ability and expertise in leveraging research and data to identify changes in consumer behaviour, organic growth opportunities, untapped consumers, along with opening up new product opportunities in different sectors and markets. 

CMO's became the ad-tech servants and ad-tech became the master with the consumer paying the CX price.

So, does this crisis now set the scene for the CMO to get back to what they're supposed to do which is to focus on growth, innovation, and product development?

The economic impact of the coronavirus crisis on the advertising industry has laid bare the ugly truth of ad tech: that many in the ad-tech ecosystem were media resellers, despite positioning themselves as tech companies. We all know why this is: source AdWeek

It turns out that the digital advertising industry has two problems. 

The one you’ve probably heard more about is simply loss of budgets     . 

The other being the continued rise of ad blockers, ad skipping and the impact on GDPR.

The promise of owning content to deliver ads fueled by mobile subscriber data was a powerful lure driving Verizon to acquire two of the web’s oldest and best-known media brands AOL and Yahoo .

For years all the signs have been there as consumers around the world installed ad blockers on all manner of devices along with the 'skip ad' function that comes with your smart TV.

Then came GDPR and suddenly the fraud ridden intrusive ad tech landscape became increasingly untenable. 

And 'Ad tech' became another global disease.

It seems that US telecom giant (Verizon) has also woken up to what's been staring the industry in the digital face that 'paid media advertising' isn't the Goose that can continue to lay those 'Golden Eggs'.

Without a doubt the future for companies who have relied on the lazy machine gun marketing tactics of the intrusive 'paid digital' media space continues to shrink. 

Throw into the mix declines in revenues and reductions in the workforce all accelerated by this pandemic suggest that brands of today and tomorrow need to urgently adopt a radically different mindset if they are to remain front of mind and relevant to a consumer who has been screaming that they have had enough of the digital ad overload for years.

App Tracking Transparency, which launched with iOS 14.5, is Apple's new privacy feature that requires apps to ask permission to track you. Users can also turn off tracking for all apps by default.

So, brands need to be thinking less about push advertising and more about creating media messages and 'storytelling' that people can become involved with and are more likely to share within their peer group and family.

I often get asked if I have a specific audience in mind when producing my content, and the short answer is most definitely - I know exactly who I'm writing for.

My stuff is aimed at the multi-channel retail sector which is where my entire career has been built, and where I have considerable experience - today I want to share my ongoing thoughts and provocations in this ever changing sector, so I utilise blogs and all manner of social platforms to stimulate thought and conversations.

There's a world of content opportunities out there, but organisations are missing a huge slice of it because they still want to use social media as a means to 'advertise and promote' the corporate bible. 

'Content Discovery' by definition puts you and me in control, we are happy to spend more time on subject matters that we can relate to, and during that time we're also open to other topics as long as the content is in context with where we started our 'discovery' in the first place.

So if you wanted to gain traction and eyeballs by 'relevant' audiences and consumers instead of advertising which carries a 50-75% fraud penalty for every ￡/$ spent what could you do?

1) Think Media - Not content - entertain and inform via storytelling, but make it feel real - We can all smell an advert dressed up as something else a mile off.

2) Think Stories - Not adverts - With the influx of D2C brands (and their inevitable competitors) playing fast and loose in the digital ad space, more marketing ￡/$ are needed to compete for the same impressions.

3) Think Authenticity - Not Corporate - Leverage Employee advocacy to unlock authentic stories about your brand, people don't watch or read your brand police polished stuff anyway.

Companies who thought they had years to transform have just had a very nasty wake up call.

The seemingly mismatch between a board simply needing execution of an existing strategy (more of the same please) yet hiring for growth tends to be at the heart of the CMO turnstile.

Pre Covid (hopefully not post) companies would run the recruitment and interview process, a process that was/is significantly biased towards the paid media digital communication expertise a Marketing Director/CMO or marketing lead could bring - just check out any job role description for a marketing head on LinkedIn and you will see the absurdity of the incremental bias. 

Is this really the extent of what businesses need from it's marketing leaders, and from those future leaders who are coming through today's marketing departments?