Josh James Opens Omniture Summit 2010 Declaring: ‘This Is The Decade Of The CMO’

Salt Lake City – Josh James, Senior Vice President and GM of the Omniture Adobe business unit, keynoted the opening of the company’s Omniture Summit 2010 here Wednesday morning, addressing more than 2,000 attendees, to discuss the company’s acquisition by Adobe and its plans for the future.

“It’s great to be part of Adobe,” James said. “They are a great bunch of people to work with, and we all have the same goal in mind: focus on the customer to make them happy and successful.”

James spoke of what he called an “Industrial Revolution in data,” in which big changes are taking place in business that have made the marketing function look dramatically different than it did even a year ago. A new marketing professional is emerging, he said, one who is part engineer, part creative type, and part statistician. This new individual is going to be responsible for managing the new digital business in a complex environment.

“This will be the decade of the CMO,” James said. While the recent past has seen the CIO and CFO become more strategic, the strategic role of the CMO is “unquestionably accelerating.”

“What will successful CMOs look like?” he asked the audience. “First, they will be good stewards of the brand. Second, they will unify and personalize user experience across multiple channels. Perhaps most important, they will make the leap from providing fuzzy marketing metrics to clear business metrics that the CEO and CFO care about because they drive the bottom line.”

Finally, he said, marketing will now strategically inform all of the other business functions within the company and “invert accountability.” “As strategic CMOs, we understand more about the customers than anyone else in the organization, which means we have an important responsibility,” James said.

Omniture’s role in this new world of the strategic CMO is simple, James said: “We’re here to help marketers market.” It’s not just about technology and statistics, he explained, but about the “ecosystem and the community.”

“CMOs now have a very strategic role in the organization and will undoubtedly lead the next digital decade,” James concluded. “No one knows more about how and why customers are using your products or business than the CMOs and marketing.”