Marketers today are navigating in an era of ongoing technological disruption. Digital transformation and the influx of smart technologies have evolved customer expectations and led to an unprecedented demand for instant gratification and high-quality, personalised experiences across all channels.

At the same time, there is a growing need for transparency, accountability and ethics in marketing, especially as additional states continue to introduce new data privacy laws. These rising standards bring a new...

Analyst firm Gartner has put together something of a gloomy series of missives around the digital marketing sector in recent months – and its pessimistic look on UK marketing budgets released today is no different.

The company’s 2019-2020 CMO Spend Survey has revealed UK marketing budget allocations are overall ‘significantly’ behind their US counterparts. Yet while spend is cooling off in certain areas,...

There are three major hurdles in marketing innovation: risk-aversion, limited talent, and an inability to measure impact, according to Gartner's latest ‘Brand Strategy and Innovation Survey 2019’ report.

According to the report, the field of marketing still lags behind in terms of innovation despite commanding 16% of marketing budgets and maturing as a core discipline. It points out measurement as the major issue to new innovation.

Gartner for Marketers Practice senior research...

The annual Gartner CMO Spend Survey isn’t just about marketing spending. While this survey digs into the budget and financial priorities of chief marketing officers (CMOs) across a range of industries and geographies, it does much more than that. The survey seeks to understand the capabilities that CMOs define as vital to the delivery of their strategies and how they define and measure success.  

In the

There has arguably never been a better time to be a CMO. After years of defining marketing primarily as the “brand” or “advertising” arm of the business, many CEOs now regard it as an investment and rely on it to drive growth. To deliver on that growth expectation, CMOs need to form bonds with other members of the C-suite. Cross-functional collaboration is essential. 

A decade ago, the job of a CMO was easy. Or at least easier, in that the role had tightly defined limits. 

Today, things have changed. One of the largest driving forces behind the development of CMO strategy has been the emergence of several cross-cutting concerns that affect the work of all of the C-suite. One of the most...

In July, Teradata chief marketing officer Martyn Etherington wrote for MarketingTech that “regardless of industry, size or standing, building and maintaining a brand remains the biggest challenge facing any CMO.” With this in mind, a new report from Gartner has put across just how difficult this...

Business practices completely based on precedent can no longer be relied on with today’s market dynamics. The professional services landscape is increasingly client-centric, meaning organisations need to constantly evaluate their business models, leverage the data at their disposal and prioritise effective collaboration to remain competitive.

You’ve heard of the concept of ‘impostor syndrome’ – but does that feeling still pervade when you get to the highest echelons of your profession?

According to a new study from Deloitte, CMOs periodically suffer from a crisis of confidence – although the good news is that the C-suite has plenty of faith in their abilities.

The report, which surveyed 575 C-suite...

For many marketing professionals, the opportunity to get to grips with new technology is like being a child in a candy store.

So many choices, so much opportunity. Yet there is always a caveat. The need for speed may be important, but so is getting things right. Experimentation is fruitful, but do not work with technology for technology’s sake.

Luckily, help may be at hand. R3 is a global...

Teradata recently had the pleasure of partnering with the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) for the fifth year in a row, on an annual event in San Francisco titled, “It’s a Modern Marketing World: Creating a Frictionless Customer Experience.”

During our discussion, host Professor Eric Bradlow, faculty director of the WCAI, brought up a key point that struck a chord with me. “Marketing builds brands. Time kills brands.”

Bradlow’s statement is rooted in his...

Grad Conn, chief experience and marketing officer (CXMO) at Sprinklr, is something of a rare breed: a CMO who has been in it for the long haul.

Prior to joining the customer experience management platform last year, Conn spent almost seven years as Microsoft’s US chief marketing officer. Indeed, Conn laughs as he relates the tale of an interview feature...

Digital brings vast opportunities for CMOs to reach consumers anytime, anywhere, on a variety of devices and channels. But continuous evolution and innovation makes digital a fast-moving landscape, creating a plethora of challenges from technological understanding and financial accountability, to tackling hot topic issues such as, ad fraud and brand safety.

The rapid rise of digital has put CMOs on a steep learning curve and some are struggling to keep up...

The role of a chief marketing officer (CMO) can often turn out to be one filled with uncertainty. At the moment, the average tenure of a CMO sits at only 44 months, and the job is often regarded as the most at risk within the C-suite. The question is: why? There are many reasons, but one common view is that CMOs struggle to prove to the rest of their C-level colleagues how...

Data-driven personalisation at scale is not a new concept – it is a fundamental part of programmatic – yet consumers still frequently find themselves bombarded with irrelevant and untargeted ads.

While data-driven thinking is increasingly being applied to the audience and media components of the programmatic equation, it is still in the early stages on the creative side. In fact, a recent study reveals a massive...

You don’t have to be a data scientist to be a CMO these days, but it helps.

That might be stretching the idiom a bit – but a data-centric background certainly hasn’t hindered Yannic Pluymackers. The chief marketing officer of Lastminute.com for more than two years – while admitting he is no data scientist himself – studied economics and statistics at university, and feels being conversant in these disciplines is...

CMOs and CFOs need to get along harmoniously to achieve digital transformation – that much we already know. Yet according to a new research report from Wipro Digital, the two C suites are seeing eye to eye on digital marketing budgets.

The study, which was based on responses from 50 CMOs and 50 CFOs at US companies, says the two are seeing eye to eye much more than ever before. Yet it’s not all peaches and cream; 36% in the financial side said marketers’ use of click through rates and...

In the space of just days we heard two of the largest digital players make two significant announcements on one key technology: AI. In a show of continued commitment to AI development, Amazon revealed it is to invest $1.5 million in an AI research centre in Germany. Just days before, Google’s DeepMind unveiled the latest incarnation of its AlphaGo super-computer program.

AI has been trialled and deployed in many and varied sectors. Both Amazon and Google, for instance, have market-leading AI smart...

Forrester have released their predictions for what 2018 will hold, ranging from retail to GDPR.

In the world of CMOs, the company has predicted that marketing meetings in 2018 are going to dominated by one word: ‘growth’.

But not normal growth, CEOs are all going to be after the elusive ‘disruptive growth’. In a commercial landscape coming to be defined by rapid consumer-driven change, CMOs will be under pressure to make sure their organisations stay ahead of the...

85% of marketers are having trouble joining together their online and offline customer data, new research by Conversant has found.

As part of its CMO report, the company surveyed over 60 international CMOs about the challenges they face in today’s data-driven market. The findings show that a minority of 16% were ‘very confident’ that they are capable of identifying an individual across multiple devices online.

61% said that they are aiming to...