3 Lessons CMOs Taught An Unlikely Student

Gary Scheiner Managing Partner, Chief Creative Officer Rosetta

With years of experience sitting in boardrooms, participating in conversations with leading CMOs, I’ve learned invaluable lessons on how marketing works, how brands get built, and how mistakes get made. Here’s what you’ve taught me.

Lesson #1: Silos waste money, time, and opportunity.
The vast majority of you run your organizations in silos. Marketing controls the brand. Tech controls the Web site or e-commerce site. Perhaps a social media director oversees “nontraditional” marketing initiatives. And none of you talks to each other. My agency has answered no less than two-dozen RFPs this year for e-commerce builds in which the lead client is the CIO or CTO. When we ask about the brand, we are generally greeted with indifference. “This is a platform RFP, not a marketing RFP,” we are told.

Why is there a difference? Isn’t your e-commerce site (or mobile app or social marketing program) an expression of your brand? Shouldn’t the tools and experiences that the platform enables be directly in line with what the brand stands for? If you break down internal silos between tech and marketing, then a whole new world of opportunity will suddenly emerge. Look at Apple. At its core, Apple is a technology company ruled by left-brained geeks. But those geeks like to party hearty with right-brained artists and designers who create wonderfully creative worlds. One without the other would never work. But in tandem, they create the kind of emotional bond with their consumers that make every one of you salivate.

Lesson #2: No one agency can do everything. But some do “more” better than most.
Back in the days of Bernbach and Ogilvy (or Sterling and Draper), you could get away with a single agency for all your marketing needs. Then came Howard Draft and Lester Wunderman, and suddenly you needed specific experts. And thus you created a whole new set of silos. General agencies had no desire to play in the direct marketing space. And up until the last decade, they wanted very little to do with digital marketing either. So everybody played their positions, and you were the quarterback. The trouble is, technology is rushing everyone toward the center, where everyone is trying to claim dominance. But here’s the thing:

•  General agencies are good at strategy and ideas, but not results.

•  Direct agencies are good at results, but not technology.

•  Digital agencies are good at technology, but not strategy or ideas.

You need to find partners that will create the fewest barriers to success. Those agencies that can deliver insightful strategies, breakthrough creative, technological know-how, and actionable, measurable results will have the biggest impact for you and your bottom line. If you can’t find that in one agency, then make sure you do whatever it takes to bring all of your agencies together around the same table. Trust me, we all have egos, but in the end we all just want to do great work.

Lesson #3: You need to be constantly transforming your business because technology won’t wait.
What marketing programs do you execute today that don’t involve some sort of technology? Everybody wants an app. Retail stores are now mobile. Consumers tweet, blog, and post about your brand in every conceivable place on the planet. Even your TV commercials (that dying medium that just won’t seem to die and never really will) wind up on YouTube and Hulu and will very soon be completely interactive. It was technology that enabled the single most brilliant campaign of this past year--the Old Spice Twitter campaign. It was technology that was at the heart of Best Buy’s “Twelpforce” and Nike’s “Chalkbot” campaigns. Technology is a launching pad for great ideas. It makes marketing work in a world where everyone is connected to everything and your brand is just a click away. And that means technology has to be at the heart of everything you do.

So your CIO should be clued in to everything. And your agencies should be able to build what they sell you. I tell my creative teams all the time that we work for a technology company as much as we work for a marketing agency. And that virtually anything we can conceive, we can build. That’s the kind of synergy you want from your agency partners. Plan it. Design it. Build it. Track it. The fewer the silos, the faster it will get to market. And the more cost effective it will be.

You Can Only Fake It For So Long
Today’s marketing requires broader competencies and more innovative solutions than the usual stable of agencies can provide. It’s incumbent on you to seek partners that see the bigger picture and have the ability to make it all happen efficiently, economically, and, most important, with the biggest impact.

So that’s what you have all taught me. Not rocket science, but invaluable, nonetheless. It’s my sincere hope that the teachers will become the students. 

About Gary Scheiner

Gary Scheiner is managing partner and chief creative officer of Rosetta, the nation’s largest independent interactive agency.  He grew up in big, general, and direct marketing agencies.