Telstra chief marketing officer Mark Buckman and the boss of his old San Francisco ad agency at Commonwealth Bank, Derek Robson, teamed up this week in Sydney to explore what’s next for the CMO.
The answer? More ambiguity, uncertainty, discomfort, complexity, impossibility and the same volume of data as astrophysicists exploring the galaxy, literally.
It sounds like a world of pain – because it is – but the good news for marketers attending the Australian Association of National Advertisers’ new ‘Speaker Series’ was that their tenure is increasing.
Buckman pointed to the challenge laid out by IBM chief Ginni Rometty at its global ‘CIO Meets CMO’ conference in which marketers were told they faced a “data tsunami” in a similar volume to astrophysicists. “That is pretty amazing and pretty confronting as well,” Buckman said. “That transformation means we need to change as an organisation and we need to change as an industry with the sorts of people we are employing.”
Robson produced some data from US headhunters Spencer Stuart which outlined how the tenure of marketers was on the rise – it was 23.6 months in 2004 but last year it had jumped to 45 months. By industry sector, however, the breakdown was less bullish for some. Financial services topped the tenure turf wars at 54 months, consumer and retail were both at 47, communications and media at 32, restaurants 32, automotive 30 and healthcare just 28.
“It’s a sort of delicious irony that the people with the shortest life span should be the people in healthcare,” Robson quipped. “But if we could do one chart about what the mind of the CMO looks like it’s a mess. Just lots of stuff.”
Robson quoted Ann Mukherjee, the CMO at Frito Lay, one of the US CMOs he spoke to for his AANA address. “My challenge is to deliver unpredictable and remarkable marketing that delivers predictable results,” Mukherjee told Robson. “Unpack that one,” he said. “There are landmines all over it.”
This article first appeared in the 18 October 2013 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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