If you’re a marketer and CMO, stop scrolling and read this.
Take five boxes of complex puzzles and dump them on a table. Now fill one box with the same number of pieces that were originally in there. Now try to complete the puzzle from that box. That’s essentially the role of a CMO today. Take disparate vertical channels with lots of disparate pieces and attempt to fit them together to create a portrait of your brand that makes sense.
I met with a franchisee who owns eight units of a 1000+ unit North American brand. We were meeting to discuss his piloting of our technology, mktg.ai.
First, he showed me the platform they’re using for paid social and search. Then, he showed me the platform they’re using for organic social posts. He then showed me the DAM the corporate team was using to manage print and video assets. He then called the GM of one of his stores to ask for the login to find that that GM has the store’s Instagram account connected to her personal account. He then called another GM to find they used the corporate platform which was mediocre at best. He realized he didn’t actually control his social channels for the local stores.
Now most retail brands spend about 70% of their media dollars on digital. What most agencies fail to realize is that their marketing goes far beyond that. Think about the ecommerce site, retail store, window clings, packaging, signage, billboards, print ads, local TV, and the list goes on. Essentially consumer brands spend less than 50% of their total marketing budgets on digital advertising, yet that is where martech and adtech is focused today.
I asked him a few questions that went like this:
What happens to the historical creative and data if the company leaves the current agency or platform providers.
CLIENT
The materials go away.
What happens to your social accounts if your GM leaves the store?
CLIENT
I guess social for that store goes away.
How do you look at historical data and assets? As an owner for 12 years how do you compare the campaigns you created last season to the one you're about to create?
CLIENT
I don’t.
So you have no legacy intelligence other than what’s in your brain to remember what worked or didn’t?
CLIENT
Correct?
How inefficient is that?
CLIENT
Very.
And do you share this knowledge with other franchisees?
CLIENT
No.
Why not?
CLIENT
There’s really no way to do that.
So you just keep reinventing the wheel in hopes that you succeed?
CLIENT
Yep.
And you keep recreating probably a lot of materials that you’ve created previously and have no clue if it’s going to work?
CLIENT
Yep.
Think about how inefficient the marketing ecosystem is. This is a national brand that has more than half a dozen agencies and multiple platforms. They can’t share information across the franchisee ecosystem and as a result, they recreate the wheel with every marketing campaign implemented. Talk about inefficiency! I can put a multi seven figure number on the dollars wasted annually just from this scenario.
Not only that, but the corporate mothership also doesn’t even own the access to their marketing channels. How can this be in this day and age?
So here are some pointers for marketers:
First, own your channels! Own your Meta, Google, TradeDesk, LinkedIn, X and TikTok accounts and instances. Don’t let an agency or partner own it. This is the roadmap to successful marketing. It’s your legacy!
Second, archive every piece of creative that ran in market along with performance data and insights – quantitative, qualitative and anecdotal. Compare what you did yesterday, the day before, the month before, the year before with what you’re about to do and learn from it.
When we set out to build mktg.ai, our thought was this wouldn’t be easy. One agency exec said “Good luck boiling the ocean.” I recently told her the water was getting warm. One investor said “This is the Holy Grail of marketing. If you execute.” We’re executing. One major global marketer said, “please give me this today!” We told them we weren’t ready yet. We’re close. One global luxury brand asked, “do you work in China?” We told her we don’t even work in the US yet. We do now. (Oh, and global roll-out is on the proverbial map).
mktg.ai is your efficiency archive.
It’s an aggregation of every marketing asset across your ecosystem combined with quantitative, quantitative and anecdotal performance metrics. It is your AIMM – an AI Marketing Model that becomes smarter with each new asset added to the mix. It uses AI to analyze creative, so you evolve your marketing.
Churchill said, “Those that fail to learn from the past are bound to repeat it.” That’s also known as inefficiency and wasted dollars.
So, reach out. Have our team take a look at what you’re doing, and turn on your instance of mktg.ai to see instantly what is and isn’t working in your marketing ecosystem. Do more work…that works!
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