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With new tech, ‘agility is the new stability’ for marketers

Jean-Marie Dru’s seminal book on marketing disruption was published in 1996, when the Internet was the “World Wide Web,” AOL was as ubiquitous as Google is today, and social media meant thank-you cards. Used copies of “Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace” are
available today on Amazon for as little as a penny.

Nonetheless, “disruption” and its impact on consumer behavior was the most prevalent term and topic among the chief marketing officers presenting at the Association of National Advertisers’ recent annual gathering of America’s top brand stewards.

PepsiCo Beverage Group President Brad Jakeman fired an obligatory tracer bullet or two at his marketing agencies, asking them to be more flexible and more diverse.

PepsiCo Beverage Group’s Brad Jakeman (above), Rob Lynch of Arby’s and Dana Anderson of Mondelez were among the speakers at the Masters of Marketing Conference.
Photo by: CLARION PICTURES (3)
“We should have the mindset of extreme paranoia,” said Jakeman, adding that he worries as much about startup beverage brands as Coca-Cola. “We were all taught in business school that scale is an advantage; more and more that is not always the case,” he said, noting that some of the more recent innovators are now themselves being disrupted. As paradigms, he offered the challenge that services like Lyft and Gett are mounting to Uber, and the business IndiGo is siphoning from its competitors, having become India’s largest airline
in nine years.

“Expecting that what you did last year will work as well now is a high-risk strategy,” Jakeman warned. “Are we building new capabilities fast enough? That is the biggest question.”

Speed to market and negotiating a shifting media landscape had many marketers talking about

adopting a corporate marketing structure, one that could handle more content and do so efficiently enough to keep up with new imperatives like social media and Internet video, which is expected to represent 80 percent of Web traffic by 2019.

“I’m running my department like a network,” said Progressive Insurance CMO Jeff Charney, while describing the variety of content his sector creates and manages. Most of that content demand is because of the popularity of the brand’s “Flo” spokescharacter, which has attracted more than 5 million Facebook “likes” since 2008. “Fresh content wins,” Charney said. “If you don’t disrupt, you’re wasting money.”

TD Ameritrade CMO Denise Karkos said that marketers are still playing catch-up.

“As a whole, marketers haven’t kept pace with all the changes in technology that have really empowered consumers,” she said. “So you hear a lot of talk here about companies needing massive disruption and structural changes inside to keep up.”

A call for change, so that marketing departments can even consider operating at close to real time, is heading many CMOs’ agendas. Every marketer wants credit for the next “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet, Oreo’s answer to the Super Bowl XLVII power failure, which was retweeted almost 15,000 times. However, structural changes to push down authority and encourage speed are required if that sort of marketing feat is to be replicated.

“Agility is the new stability,” Dana Anderson, CMO at Oreo parent Mondelez, declared in her presentation.

“What’s moved to the top of my list is [marketing] agility,” echoed John Costello, Dunkin’ Brands president of global marketing and innovation.

“Fresh content wins. If you don’t disrupt, you’re wasting money.”
JEFF CHARNEY,
Progressive Insurance CMO


Photo by:
CLARION PICTURES

AT&T Mobility CMO David Christopher reminded conference attendees that he was facing the same pressures as most of them: a combination of hypercompetition and pricing pressure in a rapidly maturing market. Citing a 2014 study from Washington University, which estimates that 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist by 2024, Christopher called for “reimagining,” something AT&T must surely do to make its $49 billion acquisition of DirecTV pay off. The move gave AT&T more than 26 million pay TV customers — the most in the U.S.

“Video is changing everything,” Christopher said, encouraging his peers to invest “ahead of revenues and ROI.”

A call for more risk taking in an industry that duplicates far more often than it originates was often heard. “I don’t think advertising’s dead,” said Arby’s CMO Rob Lynch. “Advertising is just craving courage.”

Summed up former Major League Soccer CMO Russ Findlay, now head of marketing at business-to-business insurer Hiscox:

“Across marketing, it’s about smart resource allocation and making sure you get return while budgets are under pressure,” he said. “That’s really nothing new in aggregate, but there’s just ever more scrutiny and less time to do it for all of us.”

> GOIN’ MOBILE: With every conference attendee carrying a minimum of two smartphones, the question of if and when advertising will follow eyeballs into the burgeoning mobile space was perhaps the most universal concern among the 2,700 marketers in attendance.

“There are a few billion millennials and they’ve never been easier to reach, because they all carry mobile devices,” said World Surf League Chief Commercial Officer Mark Noonan, one of a growing number of sports marketers attending brand marketing’s biggest soiree. “It’s also never been harder to engage them, because they are more sensitive than ever to commercial intrusions. We are all looking for content that works on mobile. You have to believe that if you control sports content, that’s an advantage.”

“Across marketing, we need to get to a point where creativity within mobile isn’t unheard of,” added BBDO, New York, President and CEO John Osborn, citing as cutting edge his agency’s mobile campaigns with the American Red Cross, along with Jordan Spieth and AT&T. “It’s not telling a story conventionally as much as it is using mobile technology to tell a marketing story differently.”

Added ANA Chairman Tony Pace, the former Subway CMO now heading consultancy Cerebral Graffiti: “Sports are the ultimate content play, so they may be the first to bridge that gap in mobile advertising. Now, almost every brand wants to be a content creator, but they shouldn’t ignore the fundamentals: Distribution is just as important as the quality of the content.”

> WORDY: ANA is always a launching pad for new marketing mumbo-jumbo. We already detest the vastly overused “ecosystem,” so how does “macro-ecosystem” strike you? Guess one could further the department of redundancy department by making it “universal macro-ecosytem.” We also heard about “win-win” situations being replaced by “multi-win scenario,” and multi-department efforts labeled as “cross-silo collaborations.” The murder of nouns by making them verbs continued, too. To wit: “decisioning” and “architecting.”

> SOCIAL STAR: NBA Social Media Director Sam Farber was named one of four ANA “Rising Marketing Stars,” awarded to those 30 and under who have made “valuable contributions to the overall excellence/effectiveness of their marketing organization.” Last season, the NBA’s social media team garnered 73 billion user impressions, an increase of 66 billion year-over-year, and 8.3 billion video views, an increase of 43 percent.

Terry Lefton can be reached at tlefton@sportsbusinessjournal.com.

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