Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.
Hello rockstar,
As I shared last week, I am expanding the podcast to get back to chatting with a broader range of guests, outside of my wonderful regulars and this week I chatted with a former colleague Lisa Bonanno.
This gave me the opportunity to dust down my interview questions, which are wasted on my regular guests as I already know the answers.
One of those is:
We have a regular feature on Rockstar CMO called the Rockstar CMO Swimming pool, our portal to marketing hell for the overhyped trends, BS, and snake oil from this marketing industry we love - what would you like to see chucked into our pool?
This is always an entertaining point of the conversation and fed a series of articles for our blog.
The interesting thing is the number of B2B tech marketers I’ve interviewed who answer this with “marketing technology” or some form of it to be chucked into the pool and - spoiler alert - if you’ve not heard the interview, Lisa was all for heave ho’ing unnecessary marketing tech into our swimming pool.
Ian Lowe, who when I chatted with him was the CMO of content management vendor CrownPeak shared this:
Digital transformation suites are not a panacea for digital marketing. There’s this idea out there that you can just buy a technology and all of your digital marketing problems can be solved – personalization, optimization, content. Companies that buy in to that often find, years and millions of dollars later, that they haven’t achieved any of the promises.
There’s no substitute for the hard work of marketing: creating great messages and finding your audience. Figure out your strategy, then select the best of breed technologies that let you deliver that strategy with maximum speed and agility.
Tom Wentworth, then SVP Product Marketing at Acquia keeps it simple:
Technology. I’m done obsessing over my marketing tech stack and the endless vendor pitches I receive about how some random product I’ve never heard of is going to reinvent or transform something. I’ve got a simple tech stack and plan on keeping it that way.
And my chum, and regular guest, Robert Rose made a great point:
Today, in many cases I see the marketing strategy complying with whatever technology is available, rather than creating differentiating experiences. By some estimates marketing practitioners in business now spend up to 30% of their time either purchasing, implementing, learning or configuring new marketing technology. That’s a third of our time we’re NOT spending in creating great experiences for our customers.
You might say, Ian some of these are old quotes and we have AI now.
But does that change any of what these fine marketing folks are saying, whether the tech-du-jour is AI or not?
Nope, you could argue that it sharpens the argument, as AI just accelerates the problem.
What they are suggesting is a reset:
Figure out your strategy
Find your audience
Decide how best to engage that audience
Then pick the technology or decide how AI can help.
What my friends want to see disappear into our portal to marketing hell is when it starts with step 4.
We need to control our urge, driven by a magpie-ish obsession with the new and shiny and topped with a healthy dose of FOMO, that sends us chasing the latest AI-enabled tech, only to post-rationalize the purchase by figuring out how it fits into a plan we should have figured out first.
The problem isn’t marketing technology.
It’s tech-first marketing.
Hence the subject line this week “Computer Blue” by Prince, from the classic movie “Purple Rain”.
Have a splendid week!
Cheers!
Ian
Ian Truscott
Host & Chief Bottle Washer - Rockstar CMO podcast
Managing Partner - Velocity B
Personal website: iantruscott.com
This week’s street knowledge
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Enough said.. Prince….