I’ve been advocating for marketing to lead its own technology for almost 5 years now. I believe that the splicing of code and data into the DNA of marketing is one of the big picture meta-trends of our industry.
Forrester has recommended a marketing technology office within the marketing department. Recent Gartner research shows that 72% of high-tech marketers now have a chief marketing technologist role in their organizations. Even IBM is now championing the role of a chief marketing technologist (“the new profession on a smarter planet”).
But research and recommendations can feel abstract. Can we see a few real-world cases of marketing technology leadership inside major enterprise marketing departments?
BtoB Magazine published an article yesterday, In-demand tech experts find new home in marketing, that does just that, with three great examples:
“As B2B companies adopt increasingly sophisticated technology [such] as marketing automation and content management systems,” writes columnist Kate Maddox, “they are creating new roles within their marketing departments that blend marketing and IT expertise.”
“Motorola Solutions has a dedicated team of about three dozen marketing and IT experts that reports to the CMO. SAP has a business information officer who reports to the CIO and works with a marketing operations team to implement marketing technology. Other companies, such as EMC Corp, are creating groups of marketing and IT people who work jointly on marketing technology projects.”
“While organizational structures vary across B2B businesses, the goal is the same: bridge the gap between marketing and IT and use technology effectively to improve marketing.”
(Emphasis above is my own.)
It’s worth reading the whole article, so I won’t reproduce more of it here.
Well, except for this one quote from Eduard Conrado, senior VP-CMO at Motorola Solutions, who said, “We ended up merging the IT and marketing teams that were working on technology platforms into a single organization. This is the best of both worlds — blending marketing and technology into a single organization.“
Cheers to that.
