SAN JOSE, Calif., July 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/
-- Marketers are looking well beyond their traditional
advertising agency base for domain experts to drive marketing
performance and handle exploding data, digital migration, channel
fragmentation and a more diverse, multi-cultural consumer base.
A new strategic report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Council and Ebiquity—entitled "The Path Forward: Marketing's
Outlook Into The Digital Future"—suggests that as budgets increase
to fund digital marketing campaigns and more personalized customer
engagement, marketers now need additional expertise in data
analytics, content creation and channel proliferation to improve
ROI.
According to research from a CMO Council survey of 276 marketers
in the first half of the year, there's a new focus on finding
high-performance marketing partners with specialized knowledge and
business acumen. An overwhelming 83 percent of clients surveyed are
looking for unique skill sets and specialized capabilities not
found in most ad agencies or media buying firms.
When asked to identify who marketers consider to be part of
their marketing performance partner group, few (if any) traditional
holding companies, advertising firms or media agencies madethe
list. Marketers are instead looking more to solution providers
(once only seen as sources to enable technology and automation
platforms) as their go-to sources for performance improvements and
solution partners to tackle the biggest challenges facing marketing
today.
When it comes to the marketing organization's ability to address
critical marketing challenges in 2015, survey respondents gave
negative reviews in three essential areas. These included:
- Managing the data explosion (only 30 percent said they are
doing this well or very well)
- Analyzing data to create personalized experiences (just 29
percent said they are doing this well or very well)
- Overcoming financial restraint and demonstrating ROI (less than
40 percent said they are doing this well or very well)
While 60 percent of survey respondents are spending more than
$10 million annually on media buys,
only 5 percent of participants say they are much more confident in
their media or agency partner's performance. In fact, marketers are
looking to apply far more stringent and taxing ROI thresholds on
their media and agency partners to maximize return. One marketing
leader shared that as digital evolves, they must ensure that return
on investment and return on advertising investment are held to
higher standards.
"Our agencies and partners are absolutely different than they
were even one year ago," commented one marketing leader. "We have
tripled our digital budgets compared to two years ago, so we are
working to protect that. Our greatest areas of investment today are
actually going toward building our digital infrastructure and our
talent, so the agencies and partners we have now must be different
as we look to address things like data and shopper behaviors."
"What this brings to the surface is an even more heightened need
to get the highest levels of performance and output—not just from
the marketing organization, but also from the external agencies and
marketing performance partners employed by the organization,"
explained Liz Miller, Senior Vice
President of Marketing for the CMO Council. "CMOs are frustrated by
a lack of visibility into partner performance and are questioning
everything from budgets to the realities of click fraud and
paybacks."
"Marketing is at a crossroads, and now is the time for agency
partners to work even harder to meet the expectation for
performance and creativity," said Nick
Manning, Chief Strategy Officer for Ebiquity, a leading
marketing analytics specialist. "This has created an interesting
phenomenon of global marketers placing their old agency accounts up
for review—calling everything from performance to contract
structure into question. Marketers recognize that the world has
changed, and they're looking for partners who can unlock the new
communications landscape in all its manifestations while being
responsible, professional business partners. Now is the time for
agency partners to give marketers exactly what they want…and what
the customer needs."
The complimentary 20-page white paper is available for download
at http://cmocouncil.org/r/path-forward-report. The data provided
in the paper is the result of a 25-question poll of senior
marketing leaders in the first half of 2015. Of the 276 marketers
taking part in the study, 54 percent hail from organizations with
more than $1 billion (USD) in
revenue, with 47 percent holding CMO, senior vice president of
marketing or head of marketing titles within their
organizations.
About the CMO Council
The Chief Marketing Officer
(CMO) Council is the only global network of executives specifically
dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and
personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing
leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide range of global
industries. The CMO Council's 9,000-plus members control more than
$450 billion in aggregated annual
marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and
sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its
strategic interest communities include more than 35,000 global
executives in more than 110 countries covering multiple industries,
segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are
active in the Americas, Europe,
Asia-Pacific, Middle East, India and Africa. The council's strategic interest
groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales
Effectiveness (CLOSE), Mobile Relationship Marketing (MRM)
Strategies Forum, LoyaltyLeaders.org, CMOCIOAlign.org, Marketing
Supply Chain Institute, Customer Experience Board, Digital
Marketing Performance Institute, GeoBranding Center and the Brand
Inspiration Center. Learn more at
www.cmocouncil.org.
About Ebiquity
Ebiquity is a leading independent
marketing analytics specialist. We guide our clients through an
ever-changing marketing landscape, helping them optimize
effectiveness and achieve business success. Our Marketing
Performance Optimization services help them understand the impact
of their investments on core business KPIs. Our Media Value
Measurement services enable them to drive transparency and improve
media performance. Our Market Intelligence services allow them to
plan more effectively for better advertising and communications
results.
Our 1,100-plus clients include more than 85 percent of the
world's biggest advertisers, whom we serve from our offices in
New York, Chicago, London, Hamburg, Beijing, Sydney, Singapore and 10 other cities around the
world. The group includes multi-channel analytics specialist
Stratigent and independent marketing auditor FirmDecisions.
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SOURCE CMO Council