Marketing
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A new Stuart Spencer study of senior-level marketing executives has confirmed what many in business already know: the CMOs number one priority is influencing the bottom line (Ad Age story here). The complete results of the survey will be released today at the CMO Summit in Florida.
According to the study, other critical innate or learned qualities necessary for today’s CMOs include:
• Being a risk taker
• Willingness to make tough decisions
• Good problem-solving ability
• A strategic, customer-centric orientation to marketing
• Digital focus
• Multichannel and cross-industry experience
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While social or peer-to-peer lending isn’t new (in Internet time), what is new is the recognition Zopa received this month as the world’s “most threatening non-bank competitor.” 
Amidst the steady stream of stories about the worsening credit crunch and tightening lending standards, Zopa’s style of social or peer-to-peer (P2P) lending stands as a virtual beacon for beleaguered borrowers and serves as a potential investment alternative for would-be P2P consumers-turned- lenders. Traditional banks beware!
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I’ve been at Ad:Tech in San Francisco this week, which labels itself as The Event for Digital Marketing. However, as many of the speakers pointed out: What isn’t digital in media these days or rapidly heading that way?” In light of that, Ad:Tech is really about what is happening in marketing—period.
As fast as the spending in digital marketing is growing, what amazed most people here — from both the client side and marketing industry side of the business — is why it isn’t even happening faster. Most people here felt the recession or near-recession we are currently experiencing will actually accelerate the shift to digital media. Many companies, faced with a slowdown in sales, will need to find a way to sell more products or services with less resources. The general consensus is that this will push more companies to opt for the greater and immediate return on investment that webcentric marketing programs can deliver.
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Consumers are rapidly shifting their media consumption to emerging channels. As this transformation continues, the challenge for corporate marketing will be to ensure their department structure adapts to this seismic media reorientation.
In the previous era of one-way, corporate-controlled communications, marketing was most often structured in vertical stacks around product groups, usage groups or channel groups. Those channels could include sales, brand advertising, promotion, PR, direct marketing, event marketing, etc. The Web as a channel has changed the equation, because the Web can function well as a super channel for brand, sales promotion, direct sales, events, etc.
Today, even when traditional channels are used, the Web is often a major complementary component. The sales function uses the Web for leads and sales support. Direct marketing uses the Web for fulfillment. The brand-building function of marketing now often sees the Web as the most vital first brand touchpoint.
Emerging digital channels have shifted control of marketing to the consumer, and it is no longer possible to manage the “boundaries” of communication that fit so conveniently into the vertical corporate marketing stacks of yesterday. Consumer perceptions and preferences are now fed by wide and deep brand experience interactions that are more in the customers’ hands than with marketers.
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The fact that the average tenure of a big-company CMO continues to hover around a measly two years is well documented in repeated Spencer Stuart studies. It has been suggested that part of the reason for this rapid turnover is the tremendous pressure now exerted on CMOs to quickly demonstrate tangible, high-return results for their marketing expenditures and efforts. While I think that pressure is real and causative to the CMO revolving door, I think there is a deeper reason behind the volatility of this position. Namely, there are a lot of CMO 1.0 executives in what has rapidly become a CMO 2.0 world.
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