Calling all CMO’s
Posted by Chad on May 8, 2007
The CMO Council just released a new report which is making waves in the ad world.
“When you talk about business acumen, people in marketing today absolutely have to have their eye on proving that their investments are working and having an effect,” said Tim Ellis, global advertising and media director for Volvo cars, who was not party to the survey. “There’s a difference between business acumen as it applies to sales. It’s not so easy to just compare the marketing to the number of sales.”
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch
The gyst of the article is that CMO’s with agency experience are being replaced for CMO’s with a broader list of corporate experience. Simply put the era of tagline’s is over. In order for a CMO to win over the rest of the executive committee he/she must be able to justify and demonstrate success on a spreadsheet (just like everybody else).
Blogger Jim Novo brought the report to our attention, and we wanted to give him due thanks.
As peoples means of consuming media changes our methods of tracking successes and failures has to adapt as well. We get excited as we read about marketers struggling to demonstrate success and actual interest to conversion. In my opinion that means that the old Guard of Media Inteligence is not fulfilling market demand. Mike Small of ‘Comment is Free‘ gives us our latest example of a changing in the guard:
Herald editor Charles McGhee dumped its traditional pollster, TNS System 3, on cost grounds, and hired a largely unknown and inexperienced market research company, MRUK.
The following excerpt from the adweek article (CMO’s Left in Lurch) strengthens our position that a new means of collecting and demonstrating media consumption is in order.
The study’s authors write that the credibility of CMOs has been further eroded by “self-described ’superstar marketers’ who leverage personal style to elevate and inflate their titles”—and salaries, which average between $300,000-500,000 in Fortune 500 companies, according to the study. But their perception within corporations is less flattering. According to board members surveyed, CMO failure was seen as resulting from their having “no real authority or clout in the organization” (59 percent) and “a lack of credibility and respect among key stakeholders” (54 percent).
So how do CMOs gain cred? Not by touting taglines but by crunching numbers, becoming “quant jocks” in the model
established by CMOs at CapitalOne and Dell, then proving to their boards that their marketing is working, said Tim Furey, CEO of MarketBridge, Bethesda, Md.
On that point, the survey found CMOs have work to do: 62 percent of board members disagreed that their marketing leaders were providing adequate ROI data. Yet the study confirmed that CMOs with greater quantitative focus and measurement emphasis have a significantly longer expected tenure, “greater than 20 percent longer,” said Furey.
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch
We are sure that Julie Roehm would like to weigh in on the issue; we would love to hear your feedback Julie.
