At our company, Blab, I’m lucky that our CTO Joseph and I have a strong working partnership. It comes mutual respect (very common at C level), shared goals (common if business focused) and most importantly, because we spend a lot of time together talking through ways to solve problems.

I’ve learned some of the lingo of technology. I have a rudimentary understanding of database schema and at least don’t cringe when I hear the terms php, ruby on rails and lamp stack. I recognize they are development languages. But what is more important is that I understand that they are critical to my being able to effectively and efficient communicate with my customers across multiple channels.

Joseph, on the other hand, has not spent his entire career managing IT infrastructure. He can write code himself, actually thinking its fun and is excited about solving challenging problems. He’s learned something about frequency and reach and the abbreviations, cpc, seo, sem and crm don’t make his eyes glaze either.

But the real key to our mutual success is sitting down together in front of a whiteboard and sometimes over a beer, talking about the big picture issues we both face. Are we keeping up with our customers? Do we understand the problems they have? Are we equipped with the ability to listen to our customers, analyze what they’re saying and acting on the insight before it’s too late.

Joseph’s mind certainly works differently than mine. He often comes up with a completely different perspective on the issue and as often as not, his logical rational mind is as perceptive as the most gifted and creative brain. And then he tells me how he can build whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.

It’s impossible to be a successful chief marketing officer (CMO) without becoming engaged in the understanding and decision making regarding technology. In a recent Forrester Research study, “The CMO’s Role in Technology Decisions”, David Cooperstein states that while “traditionally, marketing leaders treated IT as a foreign land that had a native language they didn’t speak… today’s marketers can’t afford to be lost in translation because digital channel embed technology in everything, marketing and the multi-channel customer experience are inextricably linked and fewer resources require strapped marketers to use technology to scale.” In other words, CMOs don’t really have a choice, either they need to learn the language of technology or they will not be able to compete in today’s digitalized, mobilized and socialized world of the interactive, integrated customer experience.

So who can help CMO’s learn the language of technology? Most (55%) look to their own IT departments , even though “strained” was the most common word to describe the typical relationship between CMOs and CIOs . And in smaller numbers, they look to their traditional agencies (21%) and management consultants (17%) for support. But almost half are looking towards their interactive agencies (49%) and their marketing services providers (44%) . And it is this audience that I believe has the responsibility to take the lead in helping CMOs navigate and make the smart business decisions that make the difference between leadership and falling behind.

But even within the worlds of the interactive agency or the marketing service providers, there are still large gaps in understanding what technology means for marketing and how to make the most of limited resources and the rapidly changing world of the customer experience. Most interactive agencies are either focused on online advertising or the increasing diversity of rich applications for platforms like Facebook or smartphones. While marketing service providers continue to concentrate on the silos of their own product’s capabilities despite the expansion of technology communities like Salesforce.com’s Appexchange or Omniture’s Genesis program.

At the risk of drawing the ire of my agency colleagues, I see the greatest opportunity in the hands of the emerging marketing practices of marketing consultancies like Accenture Interactive or McKinsey or the consulting arms of research organizations like Forrester or eMarketer. If CMOs have to be able to understand how technology will help them in the achievement of their business goals, then they need help from someone who first understands their business, their customers and how the complexity of the customer experience across all touch points can be influenced, optimized and in the end monetized.
And so it’s up to all of us in the agency world to embrace new roles as not just stewards of the brand, but as, business consultants who look equally to the worlds of creative, big ideas and technology as the best way to add values to our clients, the CMO. Because if we don’t step up to the challenge, someone else will.

1 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey
2 Forrester Research, 2008 Partnering for Success: The CMO-CIO Relationship
3 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey

All the coverage does a good job of summarizing the changes to the way agencies should provide value to their marketing clients and more importantly to their clients’ customers, be they consumer or businesses. Forrester has identified three fundamental services they feel agencies must provide: Ideas, Interaction and Intelligence. They call it adaptive marketing. And they are sending a clear message to marketers that the burden is in their court to demand these services of their agencies.

I agree with the logic. Ideas will always be central, but if and only if, the ideas can be developed and converted into real, meaningful and engaging experiences for customers. As Forrester say, “Experiences become more prominent than campaigns.” Interaction is the process of converting ideas into experiences. And in general the process for interaction is what is changing most radically. Interaction used to be the consumption of messaging, mostly through traditional channels like broadcast and print. But today with the explosion of channels, devices and emerging media, interaction is highly dependent on technology to bring the “big idea” to life. And this is one of those areas where it’s the agency that needs to change more than the marketer.

Agencies can no longer hide behind the big idea or the visually arresting creative treatment alone. If they cannot provide experiences that they, together with the marketer, and most likely the client’s IT department as well, can build, execute, support and track, they will not be successful in a highly digitalized world.

And this leads to Forrester’s third “I”, intelligence. Customer intelligence is, or should be, at the core of every action, experience and program agencies promote, marketers adopt and businesses demand. While much of the process of coming up with the “Big idea” is still a very right brain, creative exercise, which demands talent, experience and the ability to communicate, it is the question of who do you communicate with, how, when and with what message that is at the heart of customer intelligence, or left brain marketing. Any agency that does not understand and value the role of data, research and measurement will not be able to deliver success to their clients. And any marketer who does not demand measureable success from their agencies will not be able to translate those marketing metrics into the business metrics that drive a company’s “C-Suite” and that will reward marketers with budgets, respect and a seat at the business table, which is definitely where a CMO should sit.

So, go check out the Forrester report and think about how it should impact your business, whether you are a corporate marketer, an agency or a marketing services provider.

The reasons for this are many and you pointed out some really good ones regarding where the energy, ideas and innovation is coming from. But the basic underlying reason is rooted in the business model of the big traditional agencies more than anything else. The traditional business model is based on revenue streams from media, not direct billable hours. This means that to be successful, agencies were forced into thinking about media as the prime distribution channel because that is how they make money. Digital agencies are not boxed in that way and as a result, they are able to look more broadly across channels and take a more customer-centric approach to communication than a media or product based approach.

Devotion to gathering customer intelligence across multiple channels online, offline and emerging social channels and then applying that to create customer experiences which produce trackable and measureable results is the key to our success at Ascentium and I believe that same can be said for the other great emerging digital agencies cired as well, like AKQA and TribalDDB. The big agencies are saddled with the innovator’s dilemma and while it won’t be the end of them, it certainly erects a big speed bump to innovation.

I’m attending the Forrester Research Consumer Forum in Dallas this week. As usual with Forrester, there is some very good information, the networking is great and the event is well run. My only criticism is that some of the analysts present snapshots of research that in some cases is months old and I’ve already reviewed it. This wouldn’t be necessarily bad if the in person sessions shed deeper insight or generated a lively discussion on the topic, but as in most conferences, the Q&A is weak and most discussions are conducted at a fairly low level of expertise.

The theme of this conference is “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customer”. It’s a very important topic, especially in troubled economics times. And I was pleased to see that many of the sessions spoke to the guerilla in the room, namely how do we cope with the ups and downs we’re facing every time we look at the markets and the economic forecasts.

I will dive into some of the specific sessions in future posts, but I wanted to raise one question up front. While the theme is keeping ahead of tomorrow’s customer, shouldn’t the real theme be more of keeping pace with customers. It seems a throwback to the old school of marketing to think that we as marketers can keep ahead of customers, that we are responsible for controlling the conversation rather than being active participants.