On the heels of Gartner’s recent confirmation that marketing technologists are proliferating within marketing departments, I came across this great example in an article in Insurance & Technology — Nationwide CMO: ‘I Have Double-Digit Million Dollars in IT Projects’.
In an interview with associate editor Nathan Golia, Nationwide’s EVP and CMO Matt Jauchius acknowledged that marketing is now investing a tremendous amount of money into technology — the double-digit millions of dollars mentioned in the article’s headline.
Jauchius goes on to describe a highly collaborative relationship between marketing and IT at his company. “If your CIO and CMO don’t have a good partnership, forget about it,” said Jauchius. “We spend a lot of time on that at Nationwide, and I’m proud of how we do it.”
“The IT and the marketing people are aligned almost all the time on advanced and emerging applications,” he added.
However, the best part comes next in his interview:
Jauchius credits the appointment of a “marketing technologist” position as the single liaison between marketing and IT with helping define roles and identify the kinds of multi-talented staff members needed to power digital marketing initiatives like customer analytics.
“He runs the customer analytics group. He’s the person who interfaced most heavily with IT to build a customer information management system we spent more than $100 million on,” Jauchius says. “We have hired a fair amount of people into the staff of this individual who worked at places like IBM.”
In addition to running the customer information management system, the marketing technologist also serves as the project manager for marketing-related IT projects, helping to secure and distribute funds.
“This role is the best way to make sure you have a collaborative relationship between marketing and tech,” said Jauchius (emphasis added is mine). “We have a strict policy that if you want to interface with IT and get funding for something, you have to go through the marketing technologist.”
If you’re a CMO spending millions of dollars on marketing technology, wouldn’t you want a technologist as part of your marketing leadership team too?
