February 18, 2015
Ashu Garg
In the past few decades, technology has driven nearly every major shift in business spending. CFOs, VPs of sales, and CIOs have each harnessed technology to achieve greater and greater impact and influence. Yet in all that time, one role has remained largely the same: CMO.
Even in the digital age, marketing has continued as a repetitive exercise. Hire an agency. Launch a campaign. Rinse. And repeat – often leaving the actual impact of the dollars spent unclear.
This is no longer how marketing works. The way I see it, John Wanamaker’s old quote – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half” – is finally both old and out of date.
Recent advances in software have begun to remake marketing as a technical discipline – and I’ve summed up what’s happening and what that means in a new white paper: “MarTech and the Decade of the CMO: A $120 Billion Software Revolution that will Change Marketing for Good.”
I began writing this paper as an effort to organize the insights gained over the course of many conversations with marketers and technologists – including at Foundation’s marketing technology summits.
It is my belief that some of the most unique, investable insights don’t simply materialize on our desks; they emerge in conversations with innovators and industry leaders. They become clear from hours and hours of listening to the challenges of ‘real-life’ marketeers at all levels in an organization. In combining these insights with the latest research and data, we identified and described a $120 billion market opportunity that has already begun to emerge.
In the paper, we illustrate dramatic shifts in buyer behavior that are being matched by a shift in companies’ MarTech spending – which we believe will lead to a tenfold increase in their technology budgets over the course of the next 10 years.
Already this transformation has begun to put marketers in charge of core business areas like ecommerce, big data, analytics and revenue, all in addition to the traditional marketing function. The technologies that have empowered marketers to begin this shift now serve as the foundation for even more powerful software that is helping them expand their efforts and take more responsibility for delivering business results.
In the last year alone, the startup landscape has doubled in size to 2,000 new MarTech companies – a surge that might make the space feel temporarily crowded and confusing. To simplify it, we honed in on the ‘Five Keys’ framework, which I explain in greater detail in the paper.
1.All hail king ROI
2.Hire Math Men, Not Mad Men
3.Publish or Perish
4.Mass Personalization is not an Oxymoron
5.Close the Deal
For more, download the full paper here.
With the right investments in these clear growth opportunities, marketers will soon have the capabilities they seek, and the technology companies that take the lead in developing them will be poised to tap into –and take over –this vast new market.
Ashu Garg: @ashugarg