Thomas Davenport recently wrote an excellent editorial about the growing ubiquity of automation in digital marketing activities across the board. But automation won’t be limited to simply the realm of digital marketing. Let’s speculate a bit on what other marketing activities might be automated as well, and what this will all mean for the work of marketers and marketing automation recruiters.
TV Advertising
Some traditional, non-digital marketing activities are being chipped away by automation. Television advertising– the mainstay of large companies’ marketing activities for many years–is moving toward a “programmatic buying” model.
How Programmatic TV Works and When You Should Consider It
Some TV networks already allow programmatic buying of ad space using some of the same software and auction networks that digital ads employ.
While it is unlikely that a Super Bowl ad (at $4 million or so for 30 seconds of glory) will be purchased programmatically anytime soon, the future of TV ads seems increasingly automated if only so that ad buyers can use similar approaches across channels.
Call Centers
Inbound and outbound call centers, some of which involve marketing activities, are also often managed with automated tools. Inbound calls are matched using software to the agents most likely to engage effectively with a particular customer.
Some companies also make automated predictions about the most likely issue the customer wants to address, and then direct calls to the person best qualified to deal with that issue. Inbound callers and website users may also be automatically ranked on their likelihood of attrition.
Testing and Analytics
Some undeniably human marketing efforts are being assisted by partial automation. Creative brand development activities, for example, are still done by humans, but the decisions about which images and copy will be adopted are now sometimes made through automated testing. Mike Linton, the chief marketing officer of Farmers Insurance, commented in an interview that:
High-level decisions about marketing mix and resource allocation are still ultimately made by marketing executives, but they are usually done with software and are often performed more frequently than annually. It would not surprise me to see tasks such as selecting agency partners and making employee hiring decisions involve software and analytics in the future.
Adapt to Automation or Get Left Behind
Successful adoption of automation requires new processes, disciplines, and approaches to data and decision-making. It clearly requires access to data– both that in internal transaction systems, and external data on customers and markets. To analyze all that data, marketers need to be comfortable with analytics and data science.
As Brian Harrington, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Zipcar, put it in an interview, “In an ideal world everyone would be fluent in digital and marketing analytics.” Mr. Harrington said that this applies to everyone in the marketing function, including formerly “creative” roles:
The Recipe for Growth: Collaborate with Tech
Another key capability is to engage with a variety of vendors in the “ad tech,” marketing automation, and digital marketing space. This is a substantial challenge, as the technologies and the vendor landscape are both confusing and fast-moving.
Most marketers won’t be able to handle this shift toward digital, analytics, and automation by themselves. Therefore, they must develop a highly capable services ecosystem to help them address all these issues. The days when one agency could handle all marketing services are probably over. Few agencies have deep expertise in all channels, software, and automation approaches.
Organizational structures and relationships need to change as well.
Only the Creative Will Survive
Many marketing organizations have created analytics and technology groups.
Kimberly Clark, for example, has appointed a “Global Head of Marketing Technology.” Charles Schwab’s marketing function has a chief analytics, insight, and loyalty officer, a chief operations officer who is primarily focused on marketing technology, and a chief data officer to boot. Many companies now have “marketing engineering” groups to develop and maintain marketing-oriented systems and websites, and LinkedIn currently lists over 56,000 marketing engineering jobs.
Those with the technical capability and innovative mindset to take advantage of the opportunities automation offers will be highly prized…
While marketing automation will lead to some difficult changes in the nature and work of the function, it offers much potential for value. It can lead to better and more reliable decisions about how best to spend scarce marketing resources, and can lead to closer customer relationships that build brand equity and improve financial outcomes.
Those with the technical capability and innovative mindset to take advantage of the opportunities automation offers will be highly prized by employers and marketing automation recruiters alike.
For those marketers who can embrace the technology and the changes it brings, it will also lead to some exciting careers. Those who keep their jobs will have found a way to augment the work of smart marketing machines. After all, marketers are supposed to be creative!
article source: CIO Journal
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