Is Time REALLY On My Side?

Time is an interesting commodity.

When I was younger, it never seemed to move fast enough. There were exciting places to conquer…new experiences and adventures waiting just over the horizon if time could just speed up a hair.

Now, as I gain in years, I’d like to slow all that time down a hair…perhaps figure out a way to earn some of it back every now and then. As I age I really start to question if Mick Jagger (or Irma Thomas...you pick which version) was lying when s/he crooned that time was on my side.

We cherish time, document it, celebrate it. Every year, at the stroke of midnight, we herald in a new year and sing the song based on a Scottish poem, Auld Lang Syne…a song for “the sake of old times”. We race to capture images of time and hang them on our walls. We scroll thru them on our phones in an effort, nee an all out fight, to keep the images fresh just to remember and, even recapture, the smallest clip of time.

Why? Because we know and fully understand how spectacularly special time is…and it helps us reshape how we spend that time, hoping beyond all hope that we spend the time wisely.

So why is it when it comes to time at work, we seem perfectly OK with wasting it?

When we asked Chief Marketing Officers, charged by their bosses and boards to drive growth, how they believed their time should be spent to most effectively achieve growth, tasks like crafting growth strategies, shaping and defining the vision and evolution of the brand, and evolving campaigns and engagement strategies rose to the top of the list. But, instead of having the time to take on these critical tasks, CMOs were instead trapped in a time-draining cycle of budget reviews, attending meetings and rewriting stories…and this is important...rewriting brand stories, NOT creating new ones.

The time-drain doesn’t end with the CMO…it gets more tedious when it comes to what marketing teams are spending the majority of time doing. When asked what CMOs wanted their teams to be focused on, top answers included personalizing campaigns to better connect with customers, finding opportunities to better listen to customer voice and identifying new opportunities to optimize operations. Instead, teams were spending the lion’s share of the day managing and manipulating spreadsheets.

So let's just take a snapshot of time in the world of marketing: Our leaders are spending time in meetings, approving contracts and editing copy. Our teams are spending time downloading excel files from one platform, formatting it, cleaning it, appending it and then uploading it into another platform in an effort to simulate "real-time" for a customer.

How do we push past this time malaise and start to apply that same attitude toward time that we have in our personal lives to our work lives? When we interviewed growth drivers, many admitted that finding time and leveraging it well has required a new mindset…and some extra help from technology. These leaders are looking at tools like AI and machine learning to take on some of the busy work from content tagging to data management.

CMOs were also rethinking Marketing Operations roles, looking to deputize and empower Marketing Operational leaders to take on the task of budget management and operational oversight more completely, freeing time on the CMO’s docket to strategize and collaborate with cross-functional peers also invested in growth and value acceleration.

I don’t take this topic of time lightly. In fact, several months ago, we identified two intersecting issues: a need to identify new revenue opportunities to drive growth…and understanding what teams spent the majority of time doing. What we learned was that our editorial and program teams were spending hours and hours of time every week researching, aggregating and managing data points.

We were drowning in facts and statistic points on everything from marketing budgets in relation to sales revenue, millennial spend trends, staffing and allocation predictions…you name it, someone on the team has been researching it. What we also realized was that our files were filled with excel spreadsheets FULL of this stuff. Some of it we posted on our website, but only about 1/3 of the research was online, leaving a massive inventory of intelligence sitting in excel files.

That’s when the opportunity became clear…turn this glut of curated intelligence into a subscription service in an effort to transform our business. With the subscription economy in full boom, it was time for the CMO Council to join the party.

Welcome the CMO Council’s Insight Center, an annual subscription is $99…so just about 25-cents/day. For our team, their time is now helping further grow the business and isn’t landing as a line item on an excel doc. For our business, we are joining the subscription economy and using our time to reinvest into what the peer-powered network is all about: advancing the role of the CMO. And for me, I get to have a little time back to look at projects like chat bots and content concierge systems to see if we can make time just a little bit smarter. 

How are you rethinking time? I'd love to hear...leave a comment below on something you have had to rethink in order to make better use of time. I'll compile a big list of time-innovations!