Surfing in a sea of sharks and dolphins

As someone who is shamelessly and frequently pestering his mates still working corporate side to grant an audience to one of the portfolio of marketing tech businesses in which I have an interest, this article by McKinsey caught my eye. It talks about how tough it is for these same corporates to sift the sharks from the dolphins in the choppy seas of a technological revolution. At least one of the authors (there are always at least three for any article by ‘The Firm’) must be a surfer because they make heavy use of surfing and waves analogies. Is a new technology a wave you can ride, or is it one that will smash you, are there sharks lurking below? How do you tell what is a distraction or disruption? You can’t track every change, and it’s hard to spot the potential or threat in the ones you do.
 

Being McKinsey they have developed a handy strategic tool to categorize everything that starts with a simple division between supply and demand side and then sub-divides further according to materiality. They will be happy to explain more I’m sure. They are looking at an overall corporate strategy level. I’m more interested in just the new marketing technologies – any new tech-based offer that improves your ability to do better marketing.
 

I have mentioned in the past that, IMHO, this is the only game in town. I really doubt the ability of any new analogue tool that improves your brand positioning, market segmentation, innovation process, agency briefings, research methodology, budget allocation etc to drive better marketing. Only strong leadership, great ideas and new digital (for want of a better word) technology can do that. 
 

But back to my opening concern, I am sympathetic to the people working on the client side beset by all these new marketing tech platforms and tools. There are a lot of them about and, as McKinsey acknowledge, they are growing exponentially fuelled by a tsunami of private equity looking for high and relatively rapid returns. Let me explain this last point. Fact is, marketing tech companies don’t cost much to start and if they catch on (and are run well) can reach decent revenues fast. They then attract high valuations, often pre-profit, because there are a high number of potential buyers. In the old days you could only sell to one of the big comms, media or research groups, and of course they all became just a few large marketing services conglomerates. These days there are also a whole bunch of big tech acquirers and some of the big consultancy firms interested. They can leverage the emerging marketing tech better than the WPP’s or Omnicom’s and are therefore prepared to pay more (they understand them better as well which helps). 
 

So, low cost of entry for a start-up, potential to grow rapidly, lots of investment money around and plenty of potential acquirers gives you lots and lots of new marketing technologies that demand your attention. Tough for the senior marketers, which ones do you try out? You need to make choices because every trial or adoption costs not just money but sucks in resources. They may require you to rethink well-established processes and ways of working and then there is the IT department to keep on-side – if it is digital then it has system implications. 
 

I’d like to think that I, and those like me (there are a growing number of us), are part of the answer. We’ve retired from the corporate game but still remember how it is played and we do have the time to sort the sharks from the dolphins, the waves you can ride from the ones to let roll by. We invest our time and money, so while you know we have a vested interest in promoting our portfolio companies as the latest/best thing, we also have skin in the game. Beyond just cherry picking, the crucial role we play, if we are doing our job properly as active investors, is to help shape the new offer to be most understandable and powerful for our former colleagues. But like I say, there are a lot of us, a lot of businesses that we’re punting and we are not exactly objective. 
 

So how do you, a senior marketing client, decide which ones to ‘give a go’ and which ones to reject?  Here is my simple test – are they “Wow, Easy, Cool”?
 

The potential of this new marketing tech to allow you to do much better marketing has to smack you between the eyes – Wow! If you are not getting it, it feels smart but not amazing, it’s a bit fuzzy, then let it go. 
 

If you also see what it displaces, how it fits in, which budget it comes from (i.e. Easy) then move to the next question.
 

Cool – not the best word maybe but there to capture the idea that it should free up money, time, effort that can be better deployed elsewhere. 
 

Wow, Easy, Cool – not so different to the way you’d look at a new brand idea in terms of market impact.
 

And of course all my portfolio businesses are always Wow, Easy, Cool. At least I hope they are or I’ve lost money and wasted time I could have gone surfing (if I weren’t so scared of sharks).

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