As an early Xmas present every year, I look forward to the IPA effectiveness conference in October - it is a gift as it updates and codifies best practice of what does and doesn’t work in marketing to drive incremental commercial outcomes. However, this year I couldn’t help but be triggered by the welcoming address:

“The power of a big and simple idea, with emotionally engaging creativity, executed consistently over time, with brand purpose and product innovation working together, are proven again and again. The game is ultimately the same, even if the rules are changing all the time.” [Emphasis added]

But really, is the game the same? Development in marketing science (meaning: replicable rules that apply repeatedly across categories to drive ROMI) has only been around in its current form for 30 years at best – think the IPA Databank and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Even then, our oldest marketing strategy blueprints (integrated marketing communications, or IMC, are from CPG companies which are maximum 100 years old. So the rules of the game of growth haven’t been around for long in the scheme of things, but at least they are increasingly well socialised.

However, in the last 10 years I’d argue that the rules have been so poorly applied and that we now have too much variance in how to play the game of growth. So much so, that the value of marketing talent is increasingly questioned; resulting in an inflection point in our industry around the simple question of: What is the value of a CMO? Let me be clear: not the profession, but the role of generalist, senior marketers at the same level as the rest of the C-Suite.

Why do I think this? Firstly, the evidence is everywhere of this inflection point: ‘real effectiveness’ has declined over time and the short-termist ‘tactification’ of marketing has created an ever-decreasing value spiral. If the game is the same, we’re clearly scoring quite a few ‘own’ goals or getting sin-binned. Case in point: in my humble experience; there’s a huge gap between the seminal theory of balancing brand building versus sales activation activities and the reality. I bet that we can probably all recite the 60/40 ratio split drilled into us at every other conference, but in my own experience, I see ANZ advertisers nowhere near these best practice norms. But why, given the rules (or even ‘laws’) of the game of growth are not new anymore?

Well, in a bid to ‘survive til ‘25,’ I have witnessed a surge in structural changes to re-focus around growth and product marketing specialisms – lured by the opportunity to grow and monetise the existing customer base with purely owned and earned channels and then, tooling your product to upsell the customer base itself with minimal input from marketing or sales – these specialisms seem too good to be true.

Of course, this leaves generalists, creatives, and of course the brand-skewed marketers on the metaphorical shelf. However, such a move, accelerated by the rise of martech – promising direct to the CFO a decrease in reliance on paid media and more proven ROI – has unbalanced the game to favour the striker; measuring what is easiest to measure, not what is harder to measure. Even the notion of “growth hacking,” which is to subvert the established laws of brand growth through high intensity innovative experimentation, while attractive, remains a short-term proposition that must be seen as only a tool within a wider toolkit, rather than the toolkit itself. Sadly, I don’t think this is the case.

Skills fragmentation

Another muddying of the rules of the game has occurred in line with the increasing media fragmentation of the 2000s – namely, given the increasing complexity of media distribution channels available, we lack a shared currency on what technical and soft skills progression looks like, i.e. what blend of skills are required to be considered for example, a marketing manager or a head of marketing?

Although, granted, there are now some great initiatives in play to remedy this, such as the AMI Competency framework, nevertheless, we still have to address the current obscure outcomes I have experienced in my own career such as: lop-sided CMOs who have ‘only’ branding experience or ‘only’ performance media skill-sets; clients who ‘outsource their brain’ to agencies to write the marketing strategy; and my personal pet peeve – an obsession with the promotion “P” of the marketing mix and where many CMOs are in fact merely chief advertising and promotions officers, detached from pricing, distribution and upstream business conversations. Such obscure outcomes are a sign of an inefficient market, in marketing… the irony!

Let’s be real: the skills required to even play the game are now overwhelming, with 79 per cent of marketers stating that the skill set required for their roles had changed completely over the past decade. The following list will be common to many of you – AI, Google Analytics 4, Web3, a growing martech stack (of which few of us are really sure if we are getting value from…) and an ever-increasing number of social media platforms. Not even mentioning the broader minefield of navigating the commercial payback of ‘brand purpose’ and trying to keep consumers transacting vis-a-vis the dizzying heights of their expectations of frictionless brand experiences. When I entered the industry we used to tell clients that the average attention span of a consumer was 3 seconds, I reckon we’re now in millisecond territory. And to top it off, many marketers (me included) have experienced redundancies as still, still, marketing is seen as an expense, not a true investment to realise future cash flows that would otherwise not exist.

Risky times

So, it is a bleak picture, but I believe that to ride out the inflexion point, we have to remind ourselves of a fundamental truth and invest beyond the technical training the growth game demands of us.

The fundamental truth is that marketers are a uniquely vulnerable set of professionals, and I say this not because I think marketers are a special breed. Although we are a younger profession versus the more established functions of the office of the chief legal counsel, CFO, COO and CEO etc., we must also acknowledge that many other professions are too being rocked by the staggering rate of change. Instead, I mean that marketing is the most exposed vantage point on the cliff of the corporate world because it's responsible for the hardest, most complex part of business: tomorrow’s revenue and profit generation. In many ways, marketing is the vanguard of a business, the tip of the spear if you will, that has to be an active participant in emerging technology, new distribution channels and the scariest thing of all – trying to apply creativity to be a commercial accelerant to the run-rate of business growth.

In a line; we’re the risk takers in business. And that is a very vulnerable place to be in a depressed economic cycle. Respectfully, it is rather easy to sit on the sidelines and talk about the downside risk (legal), talk about the unknown potential ROI (finance), but it takes real skill to create buy-in around the value on what is inherently intangible. With this too comes massive responsibility as we are, to use the language of the MFA, ‘change makers’ – we have an obligation to reflect the society we serve and sometimes, provoke change not just in business, but culture and the broader economy.

What worries me is not Gen AI – despite 87 per cent of us losing sleep about whether it will replace our jobs – as our profession has already survived many similar systemic changes (the examples are numerous but remember the ‘death’ of media channels heralded by the advent of programmatic, cable TV, social networks?). What actually worries me is the ability or perhaps, better stated; the confidence of this marketing community to stand behind the core of the job: the insanely hard task you have to deliver growth in a game where there are rulebooks upon rulebooks, where the goalposts move constantly and where there is an emotional head-game weighing us down regarding the relentless continuous professional development we undertake to remain relevant. Yet, you are consistently (still) met with strongly-held opinions from non-marketing professionals on what ‘good’ marketing is and isn’t. Imagine the look on the face of the CFO if the standardised accounting principles were being debated, disrupted and changed monthly – if not daily.

Competence vs. confidence

And where does one acquire this confidence? Well in my own case, it was realising that to be this effective risk-taker, I needed to supercharge my emotional intelligence and frankly, address the deep loneliness that many senior marketers feel. The solution: The Marketing Academy, which, now entering its 10th year in Australia, has for many people like me, unlocked an assuredness in leadership skills for over 300 scholars, who now effect game-changing growth for their enterprises.

To conclude; should you do a course on Gen. AI? Yes, of course. Will it replace you? Slim chance. Increasing your technical skill alone will not solve the systemic problems we have in our brilliant industry. My broader advice, should you wish to hear it, is investing time in the core value proposition of marketing: putting our necks on the line to play the game of growth on an ever-shifting playing field. Invest in your ability to influence not just those you manage, but those adjacent to and above you. That is the superpower you need to help our industry at this precarious inflection point.

Applications for the 10th year of The Marketing Academy scholarship are now open. Applicants must be nominated by someone – everything you need to know here.