The Perfect Storm – media fragmentation and growth

Keith Weed, CMO at Unilever suggests the tides have turned and the perfect storm of media fragmentation and economic growth may bring everybody opportunity in the coming 5 years, but getting there will take us through uncharted waters.
 

The 2014 Perfect Storm research project, undertaken by the Haystack Group where results have been gathered across a series of face-to-face interviews and a quantitative survey of over 7,500 leading marketing practitioners, is now available.
 

This is by way of follow-up to research undertaken in 2008 – Weathering the Storm – where a combination of realisation and naïve-understanding of the 'change' about to face the marketing profession focused on customer retention and cost management strategies as the priorities for their 5-year vision. 2014 sees growth leading the strategic priorities going forward. 
 

In 2008 campaign themes were keeping most Marketing Directors awake at night, while the CMO of 2014 is far more concerned about channel strategies and the entire customer experience.

This combined with an increase in data, marketing governance and reliance on ROI to underpin the story of success, means marketing talent is changing dramatically. The combination of engineers to get the targeting and response measurement more finely tuned, and artists to refine the environment in which the brand operates will, define the winning crew for the stormy waters ahead;

'What’s been added to any marketing leadership role is the need to be much more commercially focused and numerically literate.' Dominic Grounsell, Sales & Marketing Director, RSA (More Th>n)

All this has implications for agencies, in terms of collaboration and their own growth. Alan Thompson, Managing Director of Haystack explains: 'Clients want agencies to demonstrate they can understand their business better, but rarely have the confidence to share more about the drivers of their business in great detail. 'Agencies want to share the challenges of their clients but get lost in the day-to-day 'collaboration' issues, which often comes across as turf-wars between different specialists fighting for budget.'


When pushed further, Thompson explains why he perceives this is happening: 'CMOs are no longer as focused on communications as central to marketing as they once were. Media fragmentation has offered up opportunities, to many businesses, which are more about how they can interact with customers than simply communicate with them.' 'This has not only impacted on the agencies they work with, but which companies they perceive are capable of affecting the commercial levers.'