Super interesting piece published by Think with Google where they took recordings of interviews with 30 board members of Fortune 1000 companies on the role of the CMO, ran it through ML, and then wrote up a paragraph (with humans) synthesizing it to this:
“The 21st century CMO is expected to be a marketing miracle worker, an alchemist who combines classic art of branding with the latest advances in data and measurement. All this while you serve as the connective tissue of the C-suite and stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing landscape of digital technology, cultural trends, and shifting consumer expectations — things becoming ever more important to the stock price. Customers matter more than ever, and since you’re responsible for them, your role should matter more than ever too. But board members don’t seem to have one cohesive definition of the role. So what are you to do? Internally, steer expectations for your role by defining growth you have some control over. And recognize that the talent of your team is half the battle to achieving that growth. Hire the best measurement people because marketing will be held to some metric that is currently beyond reach, and you’ll need them to invent it. There are many ways you can impact revenue — but be prepared to show the “I’m indispensable” math. And don’t forget the most visible CMOs also take big risks. Only 3% of board members interviewed were marketers. Likely, they don’t hear you. Listen closely and find the overlap between what the board is interested in and your responsibilities. And instead of building slides about everything you do, build one slide that puts you in a position to start a conversation around those common interests and goals.”
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/cmo-insights
From a front-end perspective, the interactivity was pretty cool too, haven’t seen this before:
One thing that stood out to me was this quote:
“You need a marketing operating system to continually check on and identify gaps.”
That made me realize the huge need and gap for a marketing operating system. I’m not aware of the landscape entirely, but I know we have marketing automation platforms (like HubSpot), business intelligence tools (SAP, SAS, etc), and content platforms (Contentful). But I’m not aware of any “marketing operating system” that is the true brain of the operation, pulling all the data from disparate locations, and revealing true insights.
I assume we’ll see something evolve in the next few years, seems to be much needed in the market.