Putting CMOs In The Cross Hairs Of The Round

In Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston’s new book, “Marketing in the Round,” I found the following paragraph on page 22; “the chief marketing officer hire Web, public relations, corporate communication, search and advertising professionals, but rarely do they interact with one another. They each are comfortable in silos, doing what they know best. Because of the lack of integration across disciplines…The disciplines don’t know what the others are doing, which won’t work in the marketing round.”

This quote gets to the essence of digital marketing today; it has to be integrated in order to be effective. Public relations fuels search, because links are needed, and media relations can be one way to get press and links, but without quality content from content creators, there will be no links and no rankings because Google penalizes you for low quality content.

Gini & Geoff go on to suggest, “The birth of the marketing round at your company might mean the death of the title of chief marketing officer.” I found this last suggestion interesting because I’d always thought of digital marketing as an integrated approach, but maybe that’s because I’ve worked mainly at agencies dealing with big and small clients, where integration is given and at smaller brands where as Director of Marketing I always had to wear many hats.

I have seen examples of the marketing executives who did not having enough broad experience of today’s current wealth of digital marketing channels and strategies. But that may just be a matter of getting up to speed, and not necessarily the death knell of CMOs. But I think Gini and Geoff may be making this point so that it startles the complacent marketing executive into realizing that great changes are happening. One, because the pace of change from mobile, tablets and the web is so dramatic, and two, companies need new processes to manage for these changes, whether that’s Marketing In The Round, Real-Time communications, Lean, agile marketing or content gardens.

However, perhaps Gini and Geoff can clarify, do you really think CMOs will not be in charge of this process, or as you suggest will another discipline arise?

I’ve been seeing new job descriptions popping up, often not quite describing with clarity what it was the company wanted the new employee to do, often the job titles are senior content strategies, marketing operations manager, or marketing programs director. But we don’t currently have one title that captures the Chief Round Marketing Officer.