CMO Tenure Increasing
I’m not seeing it in Australia – and the lazy approach brands in crisis are taking to CMO recruitment is staggering. Nevertheless – interesting comments from the WPP crew:
“If you are running a legacy business, as many of our clients are, you face disrupters like Uber and Airbnb at one end of the spectrum, zero-based cost budgeters like 3G and Coty at the other end, with seemingly short-term focused activist investors in the middle, like Nelson Peltz, Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb,” WPP added.
“There is, therefore, considerable pressure in the system. Moreover, the average managerial life expectancy of a United States CEO is currently 6-7 years, a CFO 5-6 years and a CMO two years, although the latter has improved from 18 months recently.”
Interesting story also on rebirth of financial PR. I’ve been developing a view that PR needs to get back to PR as its core function – a new PR – PR 4.0. It got distracted chasing social, content and more. We need hardcore PR help in our businesses to engage through new media.
Augmented Is Coming
Thrilled to have Augmented hitting the streets over the coming weeks. A collaboration between Brett King, Alex Lightman, JP Rangaswami and myself, we take a hard look at the road to virtual and augmented reality – and where its going. Its been incredible to watch VR generate so much attention over even the last month – makes the book seem very right for the times. You can read more about it here and watch the trailer over here.
Brett has done a ton of work getting Augmented to this point – I’m very grateful to have had the chance to collaborate with him on it.
The Marketing Resourcing Delimma
A piece from AdNews that has a few comments from me on the marketing resourcing dilemma:
Andy Lark, CMO at software company Xero, and former CBA CMO, said a big challenge sits simply with human capability in the martech area – followed by process definition and invention.
“There is a serious lack of talent capable of implementing, running and then executing on today’s marketing platforms,” Lark said.
“Most CMOs now bear the burden of not just selecting marketing platforms and managing their deployment, but in reskilling, retraining and hiring the talent needed for them.”
Innovation Rate
How do you measure the rate of innovation? For many, its the percent of sales from new products over a given period. Like Heineken who is at 9%. Macquarie is much higher over a five year period, making them an innovation leader.
Measuring innovation in this way is useful in more traditional industries where new products and services eat the old. But what about cloud businesses who constantly innovate – where the product refreshes daily with new features and categories? Essentially all sales come a new product in any given period.
And this is what sets legacy software businesses from cloud businesses. In one, the rate of innovation is throttled by significant technical and business model debt. In the cloud, innovation isn’t just a constant, its the fuel on which the business runs.
