Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

I’m seeing more and more marketers getting into low-code / no-code platforms to drive marketing automation. Like many of the more geeky things, it’s starting with a bunch of smart tech-centric marketers who are fed-up with the cost, complexity, and frankly – archaic interfaces and features of most current marketing automation platforms.

Products like Coda, Airtable and Notion are popping-up everywhere. Notion replaces the annoying features of Confluence with something more flexible and friendly. Airtable provides a simple way to integrate data sources and mine data.

Then there are data platforms like Hevo. Hevo helps marketers connect and manage large data sets – letting them mine them for insights – say correlating digital ad performance and sales without the need for or to bother a data team.

Marketers have battled for years with the services costs and talent gap in deploying Martech – low-code / no-code platforms flip the switch on a more efficient and affordable way to make marketing work.

1. The Power of Small Steps from my mate Dandapani (you should do his course – The Power of Focus)
2. If you want to know how Amazon works – this guy is the expert.
3. The rise of the corporate private investigator
4. The Science of Wisdom (or, as Miles Kington’s dictum goes: ‘knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad’)
5. A spooky poem ( though we are heading out of winter)
6. The art of finishing things (loved My Octopus the Teacher)

Check-out:

1. This latest course from the Do team. Looks pretty good. Think I am in. The principles of what we need to question and unlearn really resonated with me:
   • We think we have a sales problem, yet we have a culture problem.
   • For me, that is a metaphor for why we need to unlearn business as usual.
   • We look to the outside for answers when the answer is here on the inside.
   • We look to the competition and think they have the answer.
   • We spend a huge amount of time with people and yet do not know what is going on in their lives.
   • We hire amazing people and then tell them what they can’t do.
   • We fear failure, and yet out of it often come our best ideas.

My inbox is littered each morning with invites to another CMO conference and inevitably is the same old same. Either a bunch of vendor-side CMOs touting their wares or big brand CMOs geared to speak on what’s next and their essential coolness. I get it, I’ve been both.

What we need to hear more from are the levels down in the organisation. The people doing the doing. The makers of marketing can tell us so much more. And I’m guessing many would speak the real truth as to the effectiveness of the tools they are using. Alongside them, we need to hear more from Academics. There’s no question the immense value Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson have added to the marketing conversation.

It’s not an either/or question. We need both. What’s lacking today is a real conversation about real marketing and the challenges marketers are facing.

Well, it’s been a bizarre year so back to doing some writing and thinking. One of the many challenges in writing consistently is the mental hurdle of churning out something worthwhile every time. So, I’m going to try some new formats. Short reflections, ideas, observations – sitting alongside pieces into which I put more effort. Let me know what you think.

Great essay from Marc Andreessen. Well worth a read.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.