Era of Chief Marketing Technologist

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I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting article from SapientNitro covering the emergence, evolution and paradigms of Chief Marketing Technologists. I think it’s great to see people diving into this exciting new role, and this article certainly validates the need for the industry to move toward CMT leadership.

As I’ve advocated before, companies who crack the code on merging the roles of CMOs and CIOs into a new super-ordinate CMT role fare far better in our ever-changing marketplace. I think there is lot of synergy in thinking through make-move-sell-market through the lens of this combined office. Having a distinct CIO and CMO role in the future especially in consumer’s goods and retail industry will inhibit success in this digital world.  I would espouse combining both into a CMT role. Also quantifying the qualities that a successful CMT must embody is anything but simple. I love the seven archetypes they’ve created in this article, and as I’m sure you will see, the breakdowns are extremely helpful when evaluating CMT candidates.

These archetypes truly showcase the diversity of backgrounds companies are turning to when looking to fill the CMT role today, and they demonstrate that, currently, there is very little synergy in the backgrounds of CMTs. Honestly, I don’t find this to be very surprising, given that we are merging two areas of expertise that currently have very different degree and career paths. It’s this lack of integration that makes SapientNitro’s new CMT university-level curriculum exciting because it is something sorely needed in today’s education landscape.

I continue to believe that if scoped properly, the CMT has the power to drive disruption in the marketplace by nimbly reacting to the ever-expanding variety of mediums we must operate in, while creating new sources of revenue around brands beyond their own products, such as subscription and content services, all while dramatically reducing the amount of assets required to do so. Most important, CMTs are perfectly poised to harness the true power of consumer behavioral data that we all have at our fingertips and bring it to bear, ultimately liberating us from the flaws of antiquated data-gathering methodologies.

We live in exciting times, and I hope you are as eager as I am to see this evolution of marketing function. Let the of era marketing technologist begin!