Facing the Challenges of an Evolving Marketing Landscape

The world is always chang­ing, and for that rea­son, CMOs have to be ready to adapt through chang­ing con­sumer expec­ta­tions, con­tin­u­al­ly evolv­ing tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions, and new ways of think­ing about mar­ket­ing. Over the last cou­ple of weeks, our CMO.com con­trib­u­tors have looked at some com­mon chal­lenges CMOs face as the land­scape of mar­ket­ing con­tin­ues to change. In addi­tion to explor­ing the chal­lenges, the arti­cles offer CMOs a wealth of strate­gies to use when fac­ing them.

Patrick Munden, glob­al head of mar­ket­ing at Salmon, shared some of the key ways that cus­tomers con­nect­ing through devices is chang­ing the mar­ket­ing land­scape. Elab­o­rat­ing on Salmon’s con­cept of pro­gram­mat­ic com­merce, Munden empha­sizes how con­sumers are becom­ing more com­fort­able with allow­ing some of their pur­chas­ing deci­sions to be made by con­nect­ed machines. Pur­chas­ing is becom­ing a more auto­mat­ed process, with con­sumers often rely­ing on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to make their buy­ing decisions.

James Brown, man­ag­ing direc­tor at Rubi­con Project, dis­cussed the evo­lu­tion of mobile video from a nice adver­tis­ing add-on to an adver­tis­ing neces­si­ty today. Con­sumers are spend­ing unprece­dent­ed amounts of time watch­ing videos on their mobile devices. Giv­en that this is how most con­sumers pre­fer to engage with con­tent, brands would be smart to rise to the chal­lenge and cre­ate com­pelling video-based ads to reach con­sumers. Brown shared sev­er­al exam­ples of brands using mobile video adver­tis­ing well.

Steve Cook, brand strate­gist at V Strat­e­gy Con­sul­tan­cy, chal­lenged the myth that brand strat­e­gy is pri­mar­i­ly tied to the imagery of the brand in the form of logos. Instead, Cook argues, brand strat­e­gy is sim­ply about busi­ness strat­e­gy. With this in mind, Cook believes brand strat­e­gy should exer­cise over­sight on all areas of the busi­ness, includ­ing its peo­ple, cul­ture, prod­ucts, and inno­va­tions. Brand strat­e­gy is about invest­ing in every part of the business.

In an exclu­sive inter­view with CMO.com, Guy Park­er, CEO of Adver­tis­ing Stan­dards Author­i­ty (ASA), chal­lenged brands to get native adver­tis­ing right. Park­er argues that native is more engag­ing to con­sumers than tra­di­tion­al ads. Brands are often giv­en more per­mis­sion to be engag­ing with the con­tent and make it more attrac­tive to read­ers. Native should be clear­ly labelled, how­ev­er, so con­sumers know when they’re being adver­tised to.

Thomas Bar­ta, CMO lead­er­ship thought leader, keynote speak­er, and author, shared the impor­tance of CMOs mak­ing the case for mar­ket­ing. Bar­ta chal­lenges CMOs to share exam­ples of how mar­ket­ing has been suc­cess­ful and ben­e­fi­cial to both cus­tomers and their brands. He also encour­ages CMOs to build a sim­ple mar­ket­ing mod­el that helps oth­ers under­stand exact­ly what mar­ket­ing does. Doing these things will help peo­ple see why mar­ket­ing is important.

We hope you’ll take some time this week to read through our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com and learn from some of top lead­ers in the indus­try. Please let us know what you think.