Champagne Wishes & Binary Dreams
It’s an exciting time in marketing right now! Things are changing rapidly, and marketers of all stripes are trying to carve their niche into the new technology-enabled landscape. Increasingly, interactive and database marketers are being asked to provide strategic leadership for other marketing sectors.
On the other side of the brain, creative marketers are being forced to think in ways that they’ve never had to think before, and are facing the increasing challenge of having to position their campaigns around technology and prove ROI to clients. This has created a technology war zone.
The battlefields are filled with old and new pieces of technology strewn throughout the DM landscape. Some of them lay abandoned, some of them have moved up in rank and forced to do things that they weren’t designed to do. Patches, band-aids and temporary solutions are rampant in this technology war zone. IT teams are stressed by demanding marketers, and marketers are stressed by busy IT teams.
Let’s look at a typical scenario…
You have to call Bob over in Company B to get the reports for the telemarketing push, you have to get your loyalty point statistics from IT, then you have to login to X Site to select and download your analytics for your latest web promotion, and then get in touch with Company C who does your surveying to gather more stats. And let’s not forget your email campaign, you’ll need those stats too, better login and download those! Got them all?
Good. Now someone will spend the next 3 hours compiling the data into a separate client report. Total amount of time spent on this, 6-8 hours - if you’re fast and efficient.
Wait a minute… Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier? faster? better? more productive?
Let’s face it, we got caught with our pants down didn’t we? We thought, “We have a web team, we can do Flash, we can do email marketing, we can host contest sites…” Today, these things aren’t enough. These things are expected; basic marketing 101. Now it’s all about the data, the marketing intelligence, the campaign stats, determining LTV, proving ROI, knowing exactly WHEN a campaign isn’t working and being able to do something about it in real time. The things that make creative marketers wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat… Data & Statistics!
THIS is what’s going to drive the future of marketing. Not how pretty your design is, how cool and inviting your copy is, or how many impressive clients you’ve worked for. The marketing landscape continues to change and evolve at a rapid rate, and we as marketers, need to embrace this change, form new alliances, and be able to predict and forecast future changes.
You know those super-smart people… the ones that work among beige walls and grey cubicles, where the low hum of computers and the odd cough can be heard, the ones that you thought were catatonic?! You know the ones you thought you had nothing in common with because they told jokes in binary and went to Sci-Fi conventions.
Yeah, well, you need them. And you need them now!
