• by Scott Beltran , June 3, 2010

With the explosion of data, research, tracking and measurement capabilities, advertisers expect their agencies and media partners to prove their value by continuously assessing the effectiveness of marketing programs. Marketing has become a data and technology exercise, and digital marketing in particular is almost entirely technology-enabled. Web site development, eCommerce, digital media performance optimization and tracking all rely on the development of sophisticated and complex technology platforms. The ability to successfully navigate these new environments has become a significant challenge and opportunity for marketers and their business partners. The expertise required to deal with this complexity exists in multiple places: specialist ad agencies, third-party technology platforms (ad servers, search engines), third-party consulting firms and internal IT organizations, CRM systems and enterprise data warehouses.

Today's CMO expects her organization and her partners to be expert at gathering, processing and harmonizing this data to provide the basis for assessing and optimizing marketing performance and ROI. As a result, CMOs increasingly turn to their CIOs for help. But from what we've witnessed, many client technology organizations are ill-equipped to deal with the technical and organizational challenges posed by the marketing domain, and these new conversations create a significant change in the expectations for all parties. CIOs and internal IT departments must now stretch their resources to understand the various nuances of the marketing domain, and in particular, the digital marketing domain, to learn how to use the necessary data to further align marketing investment with effectiveness.

Given the intersection of marketing and technology, a CMO must think and act more like a CIO and vice versa. Simply put there needs to be a swift and radical behavior change to create the necessary alignment between marketing and technology teams. A tighter connection will maximize an organization's cross functional efforts, establish clearer expectations and redefine yesterday's skill-sets to meet tomorrow's business demands. That said, we have experienced that CMOs and CIOs have independently recognized the need to:

1. Integrate "media" data with other data sets that live inside the advertiser (i.e. CRM, sales, OEM and other business performance data)
2. Coordinate multiple third-party constituencies to collect and harmonize the right data (digital and creative agencies, media partners, ad servers, etc.).)
3. Understand and warehouse digital media and site performance data
4. Manage relationships with technology vendors and platform providers that specialize in point solutions to support a piece of the marketing and media puzzle
These distinct initiatives are designed to maximize an organization's marketing and technology investments. However, to guide them through marketing's organizational and technical complexity, CMOs and CIOs will need trusted partners to help bridge gaps, create tighter alignment, and decode the language and processes of our business. Agency technology teams must live at the intersection of marketing and technology and constantly work to develop numerous technology-based solutions.

The need for greater alignment between the CMO and CIO is critical, and will demand greater collaboration with our client partners across multiple disciplines, media owners, and technology partners. The current marketplace pressures require that our industry constantly examine and reinvent legacy business models. It's simply a matter of survival. Now, does that change our value proposition, intensify the expectations on our talent, and force us to broaden the capabilities of what an agency delivers? Absolutely.