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The Future Of Work In Marketing Should Involve Upskilling, Science And Algorithms

This article is more than 6 years old.

By now, it is well established that the marketing function (or at least some of it) has fundamentally changed. One only has to think about the rise of marketing technology to realize that marketing is now a heavily technology-driven discipline. Take the popular Marketing Technology landscape published approximately annually by Scott Brinker of chiefmartech.com. Based on his analysis, the marketing technology industry grew by 40% between 2016 and 2017. Of course, marketing has always been, to some extent, a data-driven function. Now, however, the availability of data and a plethora of technology platforms makes marketing sometimes look more like IT than its former self.

This shift comes with implications for the work of marketing; that is, the things that marketing professionals need to understand and be able to do in order to be successful. What, therefore, does the future of marketing work look like? This is a critical question, and is being asked in companies of all sizes and types, in all parts of the world. As chief marketers attempt to digitally transform their organizations, and face ever-increasing pressure to extract more value from fewer resources, they are realizing that they also need to reassess what marketing work will entail in the future-oriented marketing teams they are building. And they need to determine which skills their people need for the future.

In my own experience, speaking with many marketing leaders over the last couple of years many have sounded like HR directors when discussing their challenges and what they are doing about them. For example, Lubomira Rochet, the global Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal, has made digital marketing upskilling one of the centerpieces of the beauty giant’s digital transformation strategy. In the U.K., where I’m based, Hugh Pile, L’Oréal’s CMO for western Europe runs carefully planned and practical, skills-focused “academies” for L’Oréal’s U.K. marketers to bring them up to speed on current best practices in everything from SEO to social media marketing to econometric models for understanding media mix performance. What L’Oréal is doing is by no means unique, but it is essential. It is also paying off: they are on Adweek’s 2017 digital hot list as the year’s hottest digital marketer and they are well on their way to having a “digital at the core” marketing culture.

Understanding the future marketer and the work that he or she must be capable of doing is also one of the principal themes of Oxford University’s Future of Marketing Initiative, of which I am the director. The selection of this priority was made by academics and our industry partners (Allianz, General Assembly, Kantar, L’Oréal, Nucleus Marketing Solutions, and Teradata), all of whom agreed that we must think about the future of marketing work, the skills that marketing professionals should have, and the roles that they will fill. With this in mind, here are three principles I believe marketers should keep at the forefront of their minds when thinking about the future of marketing work.

1. Everyone needs to be “upskilled” on new marketing technologies, including non-marketers (i.e., everyone should know something about marketing).

In a recent conversation with a seasoned B2B marketer who is facing digital transformation challenges in his company and industry, he said that you need to “understand your customer’s customers.” This is a critical insight — everyone in an organization (or value chain with inter-company relationships) has a responsibility to understand what is downstream from them to make valuable contributions. He is helping his clients (who are more typically IT or procurement executives) better understand future-oriented trends in marketing for this reason. It therefore shouldn’t be just the marketers in an organization who are upskilled on topics such as programmatic ad buying, machine learning, and influencer marketing. Those who are at least “one degree of separation” away from the marketers should also understand these practices beyond a superficial level. If we agree that the job of a marketing professional is changing rapidly and is increasingly complex, then other functions that intersect with, and support, marketing also need to understand what’s happening. This can only help the overall organization be more customer- and market-focused, more agile and adaptive to change, and more efficient.

To do this well, companies should have a portfolio of learning opportunities for their employees (and leaders) that combine ongoing in-house training programs to help employees get up with the pace of change, quality self-paced skills training lessons (e.g., what General Assembly offers), and bigger-picture strategic thinking and leadership education through the executive education arms of leading business schools.

2. Scientific method should be a highly valued marketing skillset (i.e., marketers need to think and act more like scientists).

I’ve said before that one of the problems with marketing is that often we succumb to the so-called “shiny new toy syndrome” when it comes to technology. Yes, marketers should see technology as a potential enabler. But it should not be the center of their universe. We have to be careful to not use tech for the sake of it, or because it looks cool or fun. Nevertheless, if marketers are to learn and adapt to new tools, techniques, and practices they are going to have to experiment with new technologies. The word “experimentation” is thrown around a lot these days, as are things like “test and learn” and “fail fast.” Proper experimentation, however, is often not what is meant. And that’s a problem. Experimentation with, for instance, running ads on a new social media platform, does not mean simply giving it a try. Throwing darts at a wall blindfolded and hoping something hits the board is rarely a good idea. This can lead to wasted resources, and can inhibit the marketer’s ability to actually learn something from the trial.

Instead, I think an increasingly important marketing skillset involves proper, rigorous approaches to experimentation that are grounded in scientific method. An ability to craft thoughtful experiments and trials that will help marketers learn something valuable that can feed into subsequent decision making is needed. Knowledge of the scientific method, hypothesis testing, control groups, and rigorous experiment design will therefore become increasingly important.

3. Prepare for a world in which we market simultaneously to people and to algorithms/robots/artificial intelligence (i.e., marketers need to better understand digital platforms and the algorithms that run them).

Perhaps one day the robots (or algorithms and artificial intelligence) will take over. Notwithstanding ongoing debate surrounding the future of artificial intelligence and how concerned us mere mortals should be, the commercial reality is that algorithms already dominate a lot of marketing work. Search engine marketers know this all too well, given that SEM and SEO largely involves optimizing web content with respect to Google’s search algorithms. Social media marketers also know this, as the major platforms move to algorithm-based news feeds. Traditionally, marketers have relied on specialists who understand how these algorithms work. But the days of responsibility for understanding the inner workings of Google’s, Facebook’s and other’s platforms work are over. Still, today algorithms tend to only determine what a consumer sees (or hears) when they do a Google search, open up their Facebook app, or ask Siri or Alexa a question. Mainstream use of automated decision making, at least on the consumer/user side, is not here — but it will soon be. And Google’s recent announcements about being an AI-first company will accelerate the emergence of this reality.

The imperative for all marketers, therefore, is to have expert understandings of, and abilities to market to, algorithms and AI that underpin all of the major technology platforms used by their customers. This will require new skills and new ways of thinking. But not getting ready for this now will be a mistake.

 

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