It seems marketers today are still focused on buying and adopting the latest, shiny, new MarTech tool to add to their ever-increasing tech stack.
Gartner’s CMO spend survey from August last year highlighted that budget-cutting caused by COVID-19 was unlikely to impact marketing technology and digital channels budgets. Technology accounts for the most significant proportion of marketing budgets @26.2%, media @24.8%, in-house talent @24.5%, and agencies @23.7%. What does this mean? Well, essentially, more focus is on technology (think delivery) than the actual message, the communication piece itself.
Marketing people buying MarTech
In the past few months, they’ve been countless articles about MarTech. One such piece even proffered that marketers who leverage, or invested in, the ‘right’ MarTech stack are most likely to be the following type of people;
- Data-driven
- Business-oriented
- Open-minded
- And, flexible.
All excellent characteristics. But, notice who’s missing? Yes, creative people. Those creative characters with ideas and skills to craft designs and or write razor-sharp copy for Ads and marcoms. Talented creatives helping switch people on to brands and stimulate interest to drive sales of goods and services.
Nothing like a new tool to add to the stack
New digital tech solutions can sway even the sharpest minds to sign-up for costly global subscription licenses to solve unknown marketing issues.
Real-time telemetry dashboards that would not be out of place in F1 can be superficially attractive. So yes, of course, being able to simultaneously measure multiple comms in real-time and understand when they’ve been deployed, delivered, opened, viewed, and acted on is powerful stuff for sure. But, as the legendary creative David Abbott said, “Shit that arrives at the speed of light is still shit.” And that’s the issue.
Quality vs quantity
It’s time to stop the endless stream of banal cookie-cutter comms. Focus on quality instead of quantity—put creativity ahead of technology. You may find this will deliver better commercial success.