CMOs and The Agency of The Future
In the past six weeks I have had many people ask me what I think the future of the agency world will look like. There are many opinions on this: Dave Armano, Pete Blackshaw (yes I know he is from Old Man Nielsen) and of course Martin Sorrell, to name a few.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I have landed on a must-have for the agency of the future. But before I go there consider this: The CMO is the shortest-lived role in the executive suite at just 28 months. Now, more than ever, CMOs are looking for ways to show their CEOs and CFOs that the money they spend is working to drive sales and contribute to the bottom line.
If you are a CMO how do you do this? Even in public companies it is rare to hear the CMO on the earnings call; it is usually the CEO and CFO. The CEO and CFO have dashboards that give reports on measures such as KPIs, DSOs, sales cycles, and product defects. These dashboards make them very efficient and give them the ability to get real-time feedback and make quick decisions.
Now consider Marketing, there are dashboards for Marketers but most of them focus on advertising and many of them are used mainly by the CMO’s agency, for example, DART by Doubleclick, Hitwise, and any number of custom, home-grown dashboards. They all focused on one piece of marketing, advertising, but I don’t think they necessarily deal with the business of marketing.
Certainly some of these dashboards are valuable. Take for example how they are used in the pitch process: Wrigley was recently won by Mediavest, a Publicis company; Fridays was recently won by Starcom, also a Publicis company. Having sat in on a couple of these pitches it’s interesting to note that it’s not until the dashboard comes out that the client really sits up in their seat. CMOs take notice because they see something that their fellow C-level execs are using to manage their parts of the businesses. Unfortunately most of these clients will never see that dashboard again after it leaves that presentation.
So the Agency of the Future will need a dashboard, similar to that of what the CEO and CFO use. It will be as valuable to the agency as it will be to the Wall Street analyst who is rating the companies stock. It will focus on the business of marketing and be usable by anyone who touches marketing. It will be a dashboard that allows a CMO and their marketing team to manage and measure all of their marketing spend and get real-time feedback from the market.
We are always looking for ways we can improve and ways we can meet market needs. So if you’re a CMO, take a look at what we have built into our dashboard, SocialSense. We have taken the first step in focusing on the business of marketing. What other problems should we be working on?
Great point Dan – on the concept of the Marketing dashboard – I had tried to build one that was just 5 key strategic levers but some of the data points we wanted to include were annual (like Brand Awareness) and not as actionable in today’s environment.
I think the factors you need to build in are more along the lines of – “where are the conversations about my brand happening and how are we engaging in those conversations”. As well as the more operational features of marketing – lead flow, pipeline creation, booked business and ROI.
If you had both sides of those equations nailed down in a single marketing dashboard – you would be better able to steer the organization as a marketer which should impact your longevity as the CMO.