If you went to TFM&A, you were probably looking for a specific technical solution. But you might also have been in search of the answer to a much bigger problem - how will older marketers cope with the new digital world? David Reed finds out
Some industry events have a hidden theme running through them. Without any prior agreement, speakers reference the same example and visitors are all talking about it, too. Like a stick of rock, you only find out what it is after you have taken a bite.
In the case of this year’s Technology for Marketing and Advertising show, the common thread was Gartner’s prediction from January 2012 that in five years’ time, chief marketing officers would be spending more on technology than chief information officers. It was an idea that helped bring together the many disparate strands to be found at TFM&A and give them a sense of an over-arching strategic relevance.
How else to make sense of the competing interests of search marketing or email, CRM and data-driven marketing? If you see the multiple point solutions on offer as contributing to a coherent picture of the newly technology-literate marketing function, then some type of signal begins to emerge from the noise.
A prime example of how the challenges of managing multi-channel marketing can be met - even if with some difficulty - was given by Richard Murphy, global director of Nokia.com and eCommerce, Nokia. In a session called
Murphy made the telling point that digital natives working in marketing deal with new channels without hesitation. But their bosses - the senior executives who hold the budget - are
This came to light after his team had identified the four marketing capability leaders which Nokia needed to focus on - accountability, talent development, process management and key performance indicators.
“So we did some research into what was preventing this change from happening. We’d focused on our goals, but not on what was going on underneath, such as people wondering why we were bothering with digital? To people under 30, that is not a question they expected to hear asked, but it scares older people,” he said.
Many marketers lacked the knowledge and skills to drive campaigns in these new channels, so were avoiding them. To help, Nokia identified experts and moved them into teams where they could transfer their knowledge. At the same time, Murphy simplified the 13-stage customer journey which had been mapped into a set of outcomes that made sense across all areas of marketing.
“If the business objective is to increase product consideration, the call to action on our marketing is ‘learn more’. The second thing is ‘buy more, buy now’. ‘Do more’ is about downloading apps and bonding with the handset. ‘Tell more’ is about advocacy. Marketing teams can focus on those and understand what they need to do,” he said.
What looked like a need to transform the nature of its marketing was in reality an enterprise-wide change management requirement. But as Murphy pointed out, “you’ve got to adapt or die - and we nearly did.”
It is a theme which the IDM itself has picked up as an external issue, as much as an internal one. As its CEO Mike Cornwell put it:
Evidence of how challenged many practitioners are by the new technology-saturated marketing could be found in some of the session titles alone. From
Peter Galdies, development director, DQM Group, made the point in a panel debate chaired by Cornwell.
Some aspects of this challenge are easier to define than others. The other major theme within TFM&A was big data, which as many speakers arguing against as were for it. Integrating data sets from the new channels with those already in place is a critical objective for many companies.
While there is plenty of technology around to address that, the underlying difficulty is harder to resolve. Said Hughes:
This is what draws the crowds to TFM&A more than anything else - the desire to find an answer to how to manage technology-driven marketing. It is a search for knowledge, rather than solutions (in the IT sense) that really underpins the success of the event.
Paul Cash, managing director (or
He said:
One way of doing that is what Microsoft’s Hughes described as
Learning is not always easy, especially for practitioners who are mid-career. But the one given is that change will happen anyway. As Robinson pointed out: “The Gartner finding shows how important the technical layer is to engaging with customers. The marketer of yesterday is not the marketer of tomorrow.”
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