World's Most Popular Martech is...

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Antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest, non-scientific English word. Used to describe a movement against the separation of church and state in 19th century Britan. It's relevant because this week we’re exploring how the 'establishment' affects our thinking. For better or for worse without us even being aware.

WARNING: Ignorance is bliss. Do not read further unless you're comfortable hearing the occasional hard truth.

Agent Provocateur

You’ll notice I’m no stranger to challenging orthodox beliefs. Exploring the fine line between altruistic provocateur and internet troll. This infamy generates speaking invites from event organizers who are looking to deviate from the typical vendor-pitch-snooze-fests.

So last week in Melbourne, Australia I spoke to a crowd full of some of the sharpest technical marketing minds in the world as part of the inaugural Martech World Forum. Months prior I’d pitched the organizer Juan Mendoza a topic which challenged the entire industry’s reason for existence thinking he wouldn’t bite. But he did and so then I had to craft a speech from scratch which took many hours of work. But I'm glad I did because...

During the process of organizing our thoughts we ended up writing over 25000+ words. And the question ended up being a lot harder to answer than expected. Hours of research talking with people and gathering secondary research data surfaced far more questions than our 20min time slot could handle. Every question led to a higher 'meta' question, so there were too many potential rabbit holes to go down.

But like a good strategist, focus was key. I can't reveal the speech online, but here's one of the most important themes we discovered.

You're in a cult

The speech titled, ‘Do We Even Need Martech?’ was delivered via an on-stage debate between myself and Everard Hunder in front of a few hundred hardcore Martech practitioners. We had a blast but what was more interesting was how often the points we explored kept popping up throughout the rest of the conference. Both in other speeches and via various side discussions.

The main subtext to the speech was: how easy it is to become trapped inside an industry complex. Becoming part of a machine without knowing it. And how this can somewhat ironically mean we forget to attend to the most fundamental aspects of the role. In other words, we can very easily become institutionalized within an establishment.

Something Ranee Soundara points out humorously and truthfully below.

This isn’t a new phenomenon nor exclusive to the tech industry. You’ll see groupthink and best practice running rife in most industries without a second thought about whether it’s the correct thing to do.

And I don't discriminate. Having critiqued Martech’s key rival (the advertising agency industry) in the past also. Adland is one of the most insular bubbles there is. An industry which spent decades convincing a generation of marketers brand awareness advertising campaigns spearheaded by overpriced 60sec video commercials were THE way to ‘grow brands’.

A belief skewered by some dude who wrote a series of articles debunking this fallacy.

Other popular but wrong beliefs include

How digital channels are the best for modern B2B growth. Yet...

How filling up the ‘top of funnel’ will flow down to the ‘bottom funnel’ somewhat proportionately. Thanks Dale W. Harrison for the heads up on this data.

And in tech where startups love the Lean Startup method. There's a strange belief that we don’t really need to interview or watch customers in real life (qualitative research) because we can get data from digital analytics programs instead.

Yet the lean startup method movement's prime instigator Andres Glusman based large chunks of his data gathering methodology on exactly that (note the time stamp below if you want to listen).

Or how the best way to measure online advertising is attribution via digital analytics programs because measurement models like MMM are overkill.

Yet Sam Redfern also appeared on-stage at the forum explaining how Canva moved on from digital attribution-based systems quite some time ago. But old habits seem to die hard and it seems the digital advertising establishment is not alone.

And finally, how we think we need the latest piece of Martech because something more LoFi simply won’t suffice. A belief Everard and I were forced to reveal is also likely wrong. Because the most used piece of Martech is in fact, Microsoft Excel.

The Majority is Always Wrong

All of this would come as no surprise to Paul Rulkens who points out in a massively underrated TED talk that when it comes to high performance the majority is actually always wrong. And the reasons for this are quite logical.

I’d even go one step further and say when it comes to achieving any level of performance above BAU, most orthodox beliefs and systems will be generally wrong. But I find this phenomenon particularly acute within the marketing/growth function due to competitive, game theory-based nature.

Take for example the simple fact most of what marketers do doesn’t grow brands even if they think is does. 89% of the time our marketing efforts either keeps brands exactly where they are or results in decline. Which makes modelling a growth strategy from orthodox beliefs and best practice flawed from the very onset.

Were the last 20 years an outlier?

What if our whole skill set and belief systems were formed during a time that no longer exists. Where company results were more a byproduct of cheap money sloshing around the economy than any marketing initiatives we thought worked? We'd have to start questioning the validity of our entire skill set.

Mats Georgson, Ph.D. recently observed how rare it is to find teams who have a real strategy, saying...

“'If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there'. Some seem to run by this principle; it doesn't matter where we are going, as long as we’re working ourselves to death and marketing can show "productivity".

Busy 'productivity' with a sprinkling of positive optics is every marketing vendor's bread and butter. Because they can't make money selling real growth due to the 89% failure rate they've got to contend with out of the gate.

But here’s perhaps the biggest doozy of them all…

Marketing Hires

We all hire marketing leaders and vendors mostly based on our confidence in their ability to produce advertising that's more effective than a novice. Yet experienced marketers only have a 52% chance of getting it right. You might as well flip a coin! Agencies fare even worse!

As one person pointed out, ‘2% edge over random? Dang. Not even outside the margin of error.’ What’s more interesting is how routinely ‘data-driven’ firms ignore these data when making their own marketing hiring decisions.

I suppose that all doesn’t matter too much except that ~50% of marketing budgets are spent on this activity (agencies & services and paid media). And we routinely ignore simple facts like these because it’s just how the industry operates.

Yet that’s ~4% of gross company revenue based on the latest budget averages potentially going to waste.

Secondhand Principles

It’s easy to follow institutional dogma without question. We all do it. Succumbing to folklore based on anecdotes we believe represent how our sectors, categories and customers behave. The problem is we often forget the origins.

We'll reference something that was based on a study we can’t quite recall. Something we read in a book once. Or something someone said whose opinion we respect and therefore trust without question. Very few of us bother to actually read the detail, question source integrity or think from first principles. That's too hard!

But if more of us did we’d quickly notice a lot of these anecdotes are often thinly veiled opinions. Distorted by commercial incentives with feeble support for any of the conclusions being made underneath. One scratch beneath the surface would reveal most are sales pitches that just service our confirmation bias needs.

“The question is [more] whether the anecdotes are representative and whether there is enough of a sample size to know…Many of the breakthroughs of challenger brands come from toppling category truisms, and inverting how incumbents look at the world.”

- Tom Fishburne via The Marketoonist

Does anyone care?

In my experience, no. Unless they have a sufficiently large interest in the company’s performance.

Most of us are just trying to avoid boring work, put food on the table, pay off the mortgage and worry about more important things. And that's fine.

But therein lies the opportunity for those willing to take it - with the right guidance of course (wink wink).

But just be prepared for the fact that it's going to look and sound a lot different than you're used to.

Your turn...

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