Morag Lucey, CMO, AvayaIn a 2011 webinar, Gartner Research Vice President, Laura McLellan, boldly said that by 2017, the CMO would spend more on IT than the CIO. Now that we’ve entered 2017 (how time flies!), the question is: will this statement become reality, or yet another castaway on the island of false predictions? I believe this fast rise of the CMO as a major influencer of IT spending is in fact a reality. Here’s why.
If you think back on the older days of marketing—even as recently as ten years ago—organizations didn’t use much technology in order to achieve their objectives. Think about it: ten years ago, marketing platforms like Marketo and HubSpot had just been founded and were in their primal stages. Facebook was a novel concept that was still only offered to college students. The first iPhone wouldn’t be introduced to the world for another year.
Back in the day, marketing teams didn’t have organizational transparency or seamless access to customer data like they do today. Instead they’d put an ad in the newspaper, or they might pay to rent billboard space and display their toll-free number. Barely any system was connected and, more importantly, there were virtually no platforms that enabled customer data to be seamlessly collected or shared for marketing purposes. It makes sense, then, why the CMO had little insight into technology processes or control over spending.
"CMOs should be major buyers of marketing-related technology, and CIOs need to work alongside them"
But then we saw the rise of technologies like cloud, mobility, social media, and big data—and everything changed.
Suddenly, the end-to-end marketing experience was tied together through technology. We began seeing new tools specifically designed to enhance digital media, social media marketing and mobile marketing, for example. Most importantly, this new state of marketing was fueled by big data. How much data? Just consider that last year, Facebook users were liking nearly 4.2 million posts per minute. On Twitter, users were creating almost 350,000 new posts per minute. Customers were downloading an average 51,000 apps through the Apple App Store per minute.
That’s a lot of data, and it all drives the customer communications experience that the CMO is responsible for. Think about it: among these millions of daily interactions are customers engaging and communicating with their favorite brands. Every action, reaction, interaction, transaction—it all builds customers’ digital footprints. It’s vital that marketing teams have necessary technology that enables them to strategically leverage this data to deliver meaningful and contextual customer communications experiences.
The rise of these technologies has transformed the traditional face of marketing and, subsequently, the role of the CMO. Research firm Deloitte puts it perfectly: “Once the leader responsible for creativity and brand, today’s CMO has vast and complex responsibilities reaching far beyond traditional marketing—now spanning technology, analytics, growth and, above all, measurable impact.”
Among the greatest of these “vast and complex responsibilities” is enhancing the customer communications experience as the major buyer of marketing-related technology. To keep up with today’s rapid pace of innovation, companies must invest in technologies that enable customer communications experiences enterprise-wide, and they should entrust their CMOs to lead this spending initiative.
CMO vs. CIO: Not so Much
Do a quick Google search for “CMO vs. CIO” and you’ll see all sorts of results that discuss the apparent power struggle between these two key players. While it can’t be denied that the CIO does in some ways hold a unique position of power, I don’t think the answer is a battle between these executives to see who comes out on top.
Rather, I believe these changes mark a new and very significant partnership between the CMO and CIO. In today’s smart, digital world, marketing and IT have become interdependent. The CMO may now be the major influencer of technology purchasing decisions, but the CIO is needed to ensure all underlying infrastructure is efficiently running in order to support these technology investments. CIOs may not wake up every morning wondering how they can better nurture customer relationships, but they still play an integral role of supporting the CMO.
Just consider the drastic importance of security. One of the greatest responsibilities of the CIO involves implementing the highest security measures and taking every security precaution possible. As cloud, mobile, and social continue to drive digital consumerism, security has become more top of mind than ever before. Customers must be able to trust that their sensitive data is being securely processed and safeguarded by the brands they love to engage with.
Therefore we’re now seeing more forward-thinking companies innovating the role of CMO to work alongside the CIO and other collaborative players. Just consider that 80 percent of companies now employ a chief marketing technologist—a culmination between the CMO and CIO—according to a recent CMO spending report from Gartner.
Does this mean that some CIOs will need to shift from a position of power to one that serves the needs of their company through different lines of business? You bet it does. But this doesn’t mean there has to be a classic power struggle. It simply means CIOs need to embrace change and perhaps wear some new hats in order to drive better business outcomes.
For example, last week I had a meeting with the Vice President of IT at Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, Rick Schoenhals. During my visit, he walked me into a room where I saw eight data analysts sitting at a table, each mining data. He explained to me that these data analysts were members of his IT team, who work closely with their marketing department in order to make data accessible and drive the customer experience using that information. The team still has traditional IT responsibilities but, as the department with the most access to customer data, the company realized that the role of IT needed to evolve to work hand-in-hand with marketing.
In the end, it seems there are more implications for today’s CIOs than there are for CMOs. CMOs should be major buyers of marketing-related technology, and CIOs need to work alongside them in order to drive the heart of business—the customer communications experience.
2017, we’re ready for you.
