As a group publisher at Cap Cities/ABC in the 1990s, I reported to, and often times sat across the desk from, an SVP who had a tattered and torn, black and white piece of paper taped to the wall just behind his desk. The paper read: “Luck travels in the wake of careful planning and hard work!” Many iMedia Connection readers are smiling right now, because for years the people who have worked for me at XGraph, and FOX Interactive, and Yahoo, and Reed, have heard me speak those very words.
I have always felt like a lucky man -- in no small part, because I always plan carefully and work hard. But today I am feeling particularly lucky. Today, I got my hands on the IBM Global C-Suite Study: From Stretched to Strengthened. A majority of the report deals with “The Digital Ocean” and the Chief Marketing Officer’s challenge to deal with it. “The Digital Ocean” is the vast, quantities of data that exist today and the challenge of intercepting it and interpreting it to find the meaningful parts. I have been talking about “The Digital Ocean” at XGraph for the past year. Very few CMOs are leveraging the data assets that exist today because of their inability to take charge of the volume, velocity and variety of the data. As a result, most CMOs still focus on markets rather than people and transactions rather than relationships.
According to the report, among the top sources of concern for CMOs today is (1) the Data Explosion, (2) Social Media and (3) Channel Growth, including expansion into Mobile and Tablets. That’s right -- the top three concerns that CMOs have today live expressly and exclusively within the digital marketing universe! And CMOs aren’t somewhat concerned about these issues they’re deeply concerned, with nearly 3 out of every 4 (71%) of CMOs saying they are “unprepared” for the Data Explosion. 68% and 65% of CMOs say they are “unprepared” to manage Social Media and Channel Growth opportunities, respectively. The CMOs also ranked Big Data, Social Media and Channel Growth as concerns that could be most disruptive. They concluded, Data, Social and Channel Growth were the areas most likely to cause the biggest impact-to-market over the next five years.
So why do I feel like a lucky man today? Over the next 24 months, CMOs will be looking to experts in Big Data, Social Media and new Channel Development to figure much of this stuff out. That makes people who have a specialty in each of these areas invaluable -- and lucky!
