Marketing Evolution…or Revolution? Burning Questions for New Business Development

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Advertising and marketing industry changes bear fresh opportunities for new business development; they also bring fresh challenges!

The pace of industry change exceeds “evolution”.  Considering only  the explosive growth in marketing technology – and budgets associated with it – “revolution” could be a more accurate description.

A recent MarketingCharts post gives us a peek at what Marketers are thinking as they plan for 2017 Marketing Technology investment.

MarTech investments

This data commands reflection, and it’s not just about the rapidly growing Marketing Technology categories, like Customer Insights and Programmatic or the plateauing categories like Social Media Management and Digital.

The pause for reflection centers on the skill set and experience needed to use and manage these technologies.

“Way back” in 2014, Harvard Business Review published The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist.

This article predicted that by 2017, Chief Marketing Officers would be spending more on technology than their counterparts, the Chief Information Officer.

2017 is just about here; for new business development planning purposes, it IS here!

One source, Chief Marketing Technologist, puts Marketing Technology spending this year at 33% of marketing budgets.  I’ll let this chiefmartec.com article speak for itself (Whoa: marketing technology budgets are now surpassing advertising), but this number ought to stand out: $127.7 million.  That’s the calculated average marketing technology spending among “large” companies with median average revenue of $3.5 billion.

Even if your average client is in a considerably lower revenue bracket, marketing technology spending is gobbling up a large portion of marketing budgets.

As we pointed out in our recent Agency of the Future series, one of the traits agencies need to “future-proof” their firms is to be a “Student of Technology”.  Again, the recent Marketing Charts post highlights this rapidly growing importance.

Who will new business development people prospect in 2017?

And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, creativity still ranks at the top as an important skill for senior marketers.

Peter Caputa spoke to this in our recent interview with him, where he discussed the “table stakes” necessary for agencies to succeed as industry evolution takes us further into the realms of technology.  In this interview, Peter expressed that creative remains incredibly critical, and agencies will need to be able to “out-creative the creative”.

Rapidly rising marketing technology budgets, in some cases, surpassing advertising budgets…   Demand for technology and sophisticated analytical skills….Continued reign of creative….

These issues and more make for Burning Questions

Just a couple burning questions include…. what does your agency look like? …and how do you staff it to be in sync with Marketer needs?

And, from a new business development standpoint, what does your positioning say to marketers in relation to their changing needs?

Are you ready for the Marketing Evo – Revo -lution?   It’s here.

Mark is a 30-year veteran of the consumer packaged goods, advertising, and marketing service industry. Mark started his career at DDB Needham in Chicago prior to earning his MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Business School at Northwestern where he majored in Marketing and Economics. Prior to starting RSW/US in 2005, Mark was General Manager for AcuPOLL, a global research consultancy. Sneider worked in Marketing for S.C. Johnson and KAO Brands. Sneider has been invited to speak at numerous Agency events and network conferences domestically and internationally including the 4A’s, Magnet, NAMA, TAAN, and MCAN. Sneider has been featured in prominent industry publications including Adweek, Media Post, e-Marketer, and Forbes. When not working (which often seems like not often), Mark likes to run miles, go to church, and just chill with a hard copy issue of Fast Company.

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