Last year at Cannes Lions, Jonathan Mildenhall spoke at the Coca-Cola Company seminar about the power of being provocative.
He spoke about Coke’s desire to develop more real time content, and the ability to do that centered on hiring data scientists, coders, designers and other team additions normally found inside agencies which he felt needed to be in house in order to respond in a timely manner. As a former digital marketer, now running employer branding for one of the largest technology companies in the world and advising start-ups in the food & fashion space, I am often encouraging brand-consumer facing leaders to retain as much creation oriented control of their content while outsourcing infrastructure oriented tasks to industry specific specialists.
What is also on the table is the voice or “pulse” of the consumer, and the CMO’s of 2014 agree that community managers and customer service representatives need to have a voice in the narratives derived before short or long burst campaigns – mutually agreeing that these two consumer-interaction roles embody a stronger understanding of the pain point and motivational levers influencing the consumer behaviors midst external forces.
The rise of the marketing operations departments has fundamentally changed the approach towards data in organizations, with lines blurred between what is a marketing and what is a technology project. More and more projects from CMO’s involve the use of technology, middle-ware’s and CX Clouds that bridge the marketing and technology department. Are these investments for the CMO or CTO? Lines are blurred like never before.
London 2012 was the ticking point, with brands shifting from the campaign model to the consumer engagement approach, and we’re seeing that with social newsroom where a team can comprise of content, production, distribution, creatives and strategy experts, all of which play the origins role from content to context approaches, i.e. the agile methodology.
There are two roles I’m looking for, one is the passive marketing mindset and then there’s the creative needs in my department, which we’ve covered. But then there’s the ROI driven marketer, one which speaks the language of the CFO. A report last year from the CMO Council covered how brands are managing programmatic buying, results showed that 30% managed their campaigns via an agency partner while the majority were split between DSP partners in the planning and execution functions.
To sum up, the primary trend is that of in-sourcing;production and procurement being moved in house while infrastructure and cross channel planning remaining in creative control of agency partners. The CMO of the future will need a technically creative team with a consumer approach and real time authority to distribute and publish. It is now the game of seconds.
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