European Marketers Face Digital Roadblocks on Path to Reinvention
Anyone watching the sixth and final season of “Mad Men” may have seen Adobe’s “Click, Baby, Click” commercial during program breaks. I love this satire and what it represents: a legacy leader stuck in its ways, and not accurately capturing or digesting customer analytics in a big way.
This perspective is spot on — and the clip is well-placed among the “Mad Men” TV series. We truly are seeing “mad men” being replaced by “math men” — by data czars, social scientists and digital curators all focused on “last millisecond” transactions in marketing’s digital age. The three-martini lunch is being replaced by the ad exchange and marketing itself has, indeed, been completely reinvented.
Reinvention is the name of the game at Adobe Summit EMEA as we took to the main stage in this afternoon’s keynote session. And beyond just the marketing industry, brands, teams, restaurants, news organizations and more are reinventing themselves every day in order to keep up with the world’s rapid change.
But we didn’t want to just talk about reinvention with the 3,800 marketers at Adobe Summit 2014 — we wanted to ask them personally about their own obstacles in the digital age.
After speaking with hundreds of marketers across the UK and Europe, Adobe released today Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves, European Edition, which reveals a major discussion point that European marketers know they need to reinvent themselves but don’t quite know how. In fact, 73% of European marketers see the need to reinvent in order to succeed, but lay the blame on their employers as the barrier in becoming the marketer they aspire to be. Over half (58%) of European marketers say that marketing success is dependent on organizational change, while other perceived obstacles in Europe include a lack of training in new skills (30%), confusion over roles and responsibilities (30%) and company resistance to trying new programs (30%).
The study also confirms that European marketers are experiencing rapid change. More than two-thirds of marketers believe the industry has changed more in the past 2 years than in the last 50, and more than half (54%) of marketers expect their own roles to change in the next year.
But what’s most interesting to me, is that the survey results show we still require a greater sense of urgency — or maybe we’re still in search of inspiration — when it comes to our own personal change. In asking respondents what an “ideal marketer” would be, almost half said the “ideal marketer” should take more risks, yet only 30% characterized themselves as real risk takers. And even though three-quarters of marketers said they know they need to reinvent themselves to succeed, 60% still want to consider their current professional trajectory.
This is some serious digital distress!
The good news is that as an industry, we’re seeing the need for change and are ready to embrace it; now, it’s just a matter of diving in. Today and tomorrow at Summit EMEA, we look forward to talking amongst marketers about their own digital roadblocks to reinvention, and hope to provide tangible examples of others’ own reinvention journeys through inspirational keynotes with Gaston Legorburu, Jez Frampton, Kurt Yaeger, Amber Atherton, JC Coghlan, and more.
Check out the full Digital Roadblock survey for more results, and tune in to Summit Live to watch the show unfold.
Do you know what your marketing is doing? Adobe is here to help.