by Christina | Jun 26, 2025 | 2009, 2025, Blog
Over a decade ago, I joined my first adtech company after kicking off my career in the traditional advertising agency world. And for approximately that same amount of time, I’ve been writing bylines for executive thought leaders at a multitude of companies about three things:
- The cannibalization of the adtech industry
- The death of the cookie
- The impending AI boom
At a certain point, it all became white noise. The industry news equivalent of Bill Murray’s character waking up to “I’ve Got You, Babe” for the hundredth time in Groundhog Day. “Yes”, all of us marketers said to ourselves, “The cookie will die, AI will take our jobs, the industry will continue to consolidate until it forms a hulking monolith where creativity goes to die. In the meantime, how can I prove the quantitative value of our latest brand awareness campaign?”
And that very line of thinking, dear reader, is the reason marketing is not dead (neither, incidentally, is the cookie). Because while we balance the simultaneously ever-changing and yet ever-static news of our industry, we also still have work to do. As Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reminds us, we really only have one job amidst the chaos: Don’t Panic. And ideally, we can take that one step further and not only resist panic (or worse, indifference), but also embrace curiosity.
We’ve woken up in Punxsutawney again. How will we change things up?
Bust that Black Box Wide Open
Succeeding in today’s adtech landscape isn’t necessarily about being the best. It’s about innovating at the fastest pace (as a wise CEO once told me, the fast eat the slow), and being willing to put your assumptions to the test with a truly objective eye and be radically transparent about what you find. Once upon a time, it was acceptable for adtech companies to operate in a black box, waving clients off with a pat on the head and a “you don’t have to worry about that”. But now, with AI democratizing analytics at breakneck speed, the black box needs to be replaced with a crystal clear swimming pool.
Go ahead, invite your customers to dive right on into the data. Let them play with it, understand it, ask questions about it. This is a critical shift away from the profoundly overused “proprietary” workings of organizations just a few short years ago. Successful organizations, and successful marketers, should now hang their hats not on secrets kept, but on knowledge shared.
This is really just a natural progression of the transparency that came for consumers with GDPR and CCPA. While we have been regulated into greater transparency for the ultimate audience of our media, there is still a substantial amount of gatekeeping between adtech companies and the organizations they serve.
The best, easiest, and most criminally back-burnered way to stand out and create greater transparency is with a Customer Advisory Board. Adtech is no longer standing on the mountain with a megaphone yelling down to others at base camp what it’s going to be doing. This is a serious two-way conversation, and organizations that invite that conversation with their customers, rather than ignore it, will come out on top.
So, talk to the folks who love your product, the folks who hate it, the folks who gave you that criminal “6” rating on your CSAT. Invite them into a conversation, actually utilize the amazing product marketers you probably just have making decks and one-pagers right now, and build a program that breaks you out of the monolith and puts you on the map as the rarest of all things: an adtech company that cares what its customers have to say.
Balance the Long and Short of It
Another thing that never changed in my entire adtech life? The pressure to balance short-term quarterly goals with long-term, sustainable company growth. On the one hand, as Groundhog Day reminds us, nothing that you do in a single day matters if the day is simply doomed to repeat itself again. Hello, Sisyphus.
This is how it can often feel when launching a new program without any guarantee that you’ll be able to run it long enough to produce results. “This webinar didn’t work” is something I often heard, despite the reality that a single webinar never works. An ongoing webinar program does. Yet it can be hard to see the forest through the trees when the arguments from one side of the house for short-term needs are concrete, and the value of longer-term programs can come across as theoretical.
So, what’s a modern marketer to do? Hedge your bets, and back your opinions with data. The best advances always come from a test and learn approach that allows you to share progress (whether good or bad) at a consistent cadence and demonstrate the changes you’re making along the way. Sprints of two weeks to one month for demand generation activities gave me the boost I needed toward short-term goals while also buying me the breathing room to focus on the long game.
As we all know, the best laid strategy will always be better received with objective data to back it up. My personal favorite marketing chart [below] details the manner in which sales and demand-focused activations can lead to a shorter term boost in sales, but ultimately it is brand awareness that leads to sustainable success over 12+ months.
If I had a nickel for every time this chart appeared in a deck and helped me get more budget for experimentation and a test and learn approach, I would have at least enough nickels to buy a coffee for the person who originally shared it with me.
The Day After Groundhog Day
While there is no guarantee of escaping the certain inevitable loops of any industry, there is always a path to innovation, experimentation and improvement. When you pair radical transparency across your customer base with a data-driven, test-and-learn approach that equally balances long and short term internal goals, you’ll find yourself in solid fighting shape to survive the cannibalization of adtech, the impending coup of our AI overlords, and – if it ever actually were to happen – the death of the cookie.
Rachel Peterson is a former marketing executive specializing in enterprise software with a track record of scaling multiple B2B companies to $100M+ in ARR. She now works as an author and consultant.
by scott.gillum | Jul 30, 2012 | 2009, Marketing
Original post date July 16, 2009
I’m about to share with you the secret formula for; 1) creating a rock solid, compelling value proposition (for products, services, solutions, etc.) and, 2) aligning (enterprise wide) your corporate communications. It will seem like a very simple approach, and it is, but once you try to get consistent answers from the organization to the following questions (in order) you will understand why this is so challenging…and why so many companies fail.
Keep this in mind, effective communication to customers must happen through a consistent delivery of the right message, to the right customer, at the right time, in the right channels to facilitate effective, efficient dialogue.
This is how you do it. You have to be able to collectively (with the right internal groups) answer the following five questions in order:
- Who? – what audience/segment are you targeting, and why
- What? – what do you want/have to say to that segment that is relevant
- Why? – why would they listen
- When? – when do you contact them, and how often
- Where? – where do they want to receive the message
Sounds simple right? Here are a list of challenges you will face when go through the process:
- Who – right off the bat, you will find folks arguing about your target audience, the segmentation approach, the segments, etc.
- What – oh, you’ll have plenty of things you what to tell whatever audience you settle on but you will struggle with relevancy
- Why – now comes the killer question…why would they listen? Seen this question bring grown men (and women) to their knees. The reasons are many; Marketers don’t understand the products, products aren’t differentiated, etc. Getting this question right is the key to the whole process.
- When – the challenge is deciding on at what point in a sales process, a marketing campaign, events, etc., and the frequency of contact. Touch them too often and/or at the wrong point you’ll get opt-outs, too infrequently, you’ll get no mindshare.
- Where – notice that I said, “they”, and not “you” on where the communication happens. Yes, it’s about your customer and where they go for information not where you want to put it. Find out where your audience goes to get information and/or determine their perference for receiving it. The othe challenge is ensuring that the message fits the channel. Certain messages/value proposition, etc. fit a certain channel better than others. It’s worth the time to figure this out.
This approach creates an execellent output but it will take time, discipline and many iterations to get right…good luck.
by scott.gillum | Jul 25, 2012 | 2009, Business Trends
Original post date June 11, 2009
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of “paradigm shift.” Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a “series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions”, and in those revolutions “one conceptual world view is replaced by another”.
Social media is creating a “violent revolution” as it relates to our definition of what is accepted as “work.” The paradigm shift is believing that it is acceptable behavior to spent half your time at work on Linked-In, Facebook or Twitter?
In a recent survey by Michael Stelzner, on social media marketing almost 10% of the survey respondents spent 20+ hours a week on social media marketing. Ask senior executives in marketing in my age demographic (age 40-44) and they’ll tell you; “I don’t get it…” In the past, spending time online at work to do personal business was viewed as a major productivity waster.
In a 2006, INC reported the productivity loss to be as high as $544 billion dollars (just think about that, if we all stopped surfing the net at work we could fund the Federal bailout of the Banking, Insurance and Auto industries). As a result, companies took dramatic measures to block or monitor access to sites, tools like IM and other “distracting” technologies.
Now after years of being told that being online at work was a bad thing, this new research and the appeal of Social Media sites, makes the case that it’s not only safe, but in certain cases, necessary to be online. According to the Salary.com & AOL survey, the average 2 hours a day American workers wasted in 2006 surfing the net is now the average time needed to do social media marketing…my, my how times have changed.
And what might be most surprising is that may be “OK” with the boss – the most active users of sites like; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are small business owners according to Stelzner’s report.
Other interest findings from the research:
- A New Day is Dawning – although 88% of marketers reported using social media for marketing, 72% have just started (less than 3 months).
- Once You Start…You Can’t Stop – the research points out a direct correlation between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly commitment. For folks just starting, the mean is 2 hours a week, compare that with folks who have been at it for years…an average of 20+ hours.
- One Thing Leads to Another – the more time you log, the more tools/sites you’ll use. Similar to the old thinking that cigarettes and alcohol lead to the “harder” stuff, the same is true with Social Media usage. The “newbies” like to start with LinkedIn, hard core users are most interested in social bookmarking sites, FriendFeed and StumbleUpon.
- Not the “Youngins” – contrary to popular belief, it’s the 30 to 39 year old segment that logs in the most time, with 44.8% reporting spending 10+ hours a week.
- Small Business “Sweetspot” – small businesses love social media marketing because it has generated exposure for their business, leads and partnerships, and to close business.
So if you’re going to be logging some social media hours on the company dime you might want to follow a protocol to keep the lawyers happy. In an article entitled “Managing the Tweets” in the June 1, 2009 edition of Business Week the author lays out IBM’s social media guidelines.
by scott.gillum | Jul 25, 2012 | 2009, Observations
Original post date April 1, 2009
A few weeks ago, my wife and I got a chance to get away for the weekend. On our way to the hotel I realized that I had forgotten my razor. We were passing a shopping center at the time so we pulled in and I spotted a Dollar General store. I went in and bought a $1 pack of razors. A commodity product, down economy, it was necessity; so I figured it was a good decision… until I used it.
The only way I can describe the experience is to say that I couldn’t tell if the razor had a blade on it until it sunk deeply into my skin. It skipped over some parts of my face and dug in on other areas. I had nicks and cuts everywhere; I looked like a schoolboy after his first shave. The lesson I took from this is that sometimes I think you have to feel the pain to understand and/or appreciate the value of quality.
From what I have observed lately, I believe companies are starting to, or will come to this same realization. We’ve all cut back to weather the economic storm. Are companies doing a much better job at managing costs now? Absolutely. Have they finally made the cuts they should have made a year ago? Yep. Have they perhaps gone too far with some of their cost cutting? We’ll see.
What’s important to remember about this economic downturn is that it started in 2007. It’s only gotten dramatically worse in the past six months, but many companies started cutting back long before the current “crisis” hit. As a result, three or four rounds of adjusting cost to meet declining revenues have already occurred.
The fat got cut a long time ago. They cut into the muscle around mid-year last year and now are cutting into the bone in many industries. If you’re a vendor or service provider like us, you may have experienced this first hand. But hang in there; I believe that companies will return to quality providers. It’s only a matter of time before the results of the “nicks” and “cuts” really begin to hurt.
Each company has a different tolerance for pain, but when, for example, the “cost saving” decision to change your outsourced customer service provider leads to rising customer attrition and declining service levels, those “cuts” will begin to sting. When this happens, and customers can see recovery on the horizon, they will come back to quality.
The question you need to ask yourself is; has your organization created the $1 razor? With all the cost cutting, is your product/service at the same quality level and/or can you deliver the same customer experience. When customers do return…so do their expectations.
Be careful, during an economic downturn the price/value equation can become unbalanced. Like many companies, you’ve probably created a lower cost, stripped down model, hoping to gain or hang on to market share. If customers return with smaller budgets, will they adjust their expectations of value as well? Should they expect less? Probably, but will they? Not unless you manage their expectations.
Adjustments will have to be made, and it will not be a smooth shave. You may already have the “nicks” to prove it but don’t let your customers end up feeling the pain.
by scott.gillum | Jul 20, 2012 | 2009, Sales
Original post date March 24, 2009
In August 1999, Selling Power magazine ran an article featuring our firm and the work we’ve done helping clients, like IBM, build new sales channels and increase sales productivity. A few months later, we received a call from the head of a division within NCR asking us to meet with them to see if we could help them with something similar.
The senior executive with whom we met said if we could help IBM we should be able to do this project for them. Excited about the prospect of helping them build a new channel, we agreed and they laid out the challenge:
- A well-known consulting firm had been previously engaged but had failed
- …which left only 41 working days to get the new sales channel up and running
- An internal NCR tele organization was competing for this…which, we would later learn, tried to sabotage the effort…and us
- And finally, we were entering the holiday season…good luck
After collecting the previous project work we quickly went to work on assessing what had gone wrong. It took us a while, but we finally discovered “IT”. Once found, this insight became the key to unlocking success.
Almost ten years later I’ve seen this scenario play out over and over in B2B companies. This is what we discovered.
The secret recipe for failure
This simple equation is just as true today as it was a decade ago when we discovered it. Oh, you may find one or two exceptions but the majority of the time when we do post mordem on failed programs you find this equation is at the heart of the problem. When combined with a few related pieces, like a lack of time in the market and/or funding, the initiative is doomed. The degree of “newness” in these three areas will directly impact the likelihood of success or failure.
Sales Channels
- Why they fail – new sales channels fail because companies aim new channels at the wrong targets — new customers/markets. An investment in a new sales channel means that it is competing with existing channels for funding. If it does not hit expectations/goals quickly, it will be robbed of the necessary funding and/or resources needed to make it successful.
- How to improve the chances for success – The most successful way to build a new sale channel is to do exactly the opposite of what is described above. Shift coverage of existing customers or products to the new channel and use your existing channels to go after the “new.” Shift dormant or flat growth customers to the new channel to give it revenue immediately and free up your existing most knowledgeable, best trained sales folks to go after new opportunity.
Marketing Campaigns
- Why they fail – new marketing campaigns promoting new products aimed at new customers typically fail because of reasons listed above…they take too long to produce and/or aren’t given the time. Here’s another common problem, agencies will tell you the problem is the “creative” or “value prop”…maybe, but they also could telling you this because they make money on creative and production. “New” works with their business model.
- How to improve the chances for success – build less individual campaigns and invest more in one or two long term programs with many integrated tactics. Keep the programs in the market longer, closely monitor them and modify tactics based on performance. You don’t need a new campaign every month, you need a program that produces…and with tight budgets this will help you be cost effective/efficient. Years ago we did an assessment of campaign performance at IBM. We found that the highest performing campaigns had at least 7 integrated tactics and stayed in the market for at least 6 months. Use this as a starting point to design your campaigns and programs.
- New to New thru New – level set expectations and invest for the long haul. You will need time and commitment to make it successful. Companies have short-term horizons that are getting shorter every day. If you’re going to lead this effort get everyone to agree on what defines success and stick with your timeline.
- New Product/Service/Solution – try to leverage existing channels, customers or both to start…then migrate to new. This way you can learn if you have the right value prop, messaging, pricing, etc. We like to take existing reps, for example, and use them to help launch a new sales channel, like Tele. We like to use existing customers to test new products, etc.
We got the NCR teleaccount program up and running in 41 days. We transitioned existing field account managers to TeleAccount managers and built their territories around their customers. We then began to backfill them with new lower cost resources over time. You’ll be happy to now that the manager of the group that tried to sabotage the effort got fired.
The program hit our first year sales targets, reduced the expense to revenue ratio from 13% to 6% and grew sales productivity from $1.7M to $3.1M per rep. As a result, NCR then built a full-scale tele channel with close to 80 reps.
Then they killed it. It’s a long story but the bottom line was the company has a strong field sales tradition and culture. Mark Hurd, now CEO of HP, became the CEO of NCR, and decided to shut the channel down, redirecting the resources to the field.
Remember my comment about competing for resources. Mark’s an operations guy and a fan of face to face selling.
Culture runs deep, and can also kill channels and programs. Maybe I should update the “recipe” to include the forth “New”…new leadership.
by scott.gillum | Jul 19, 2012 | 2009, Marketing
My inbox is full of resumes of good marketers that I’ve been fortunate to come to know or work with over the years. Solid people, with great experience who are now having a challenging time finding new opportunities in this incredibly difficult economic environment. Many of these people could have had their pick of jobs as recently as last year. Given the situation, I thought I’d try to help by providing a viewpoint on what skills set, background and experience companies will be seeking once they start hiring again. I’ll use two data sources to make the case.
A few years ago, we teamed up with a professor (
John Josephs)at
Kellogg on a couple of research projects aimed at getting a better understand of what creates a high performance marketing organizations. Internally, we thought of it as the “head” and “body” studies because we first studied the marketing organization (
the body) and then the follow year CMO’s (
the head).
We surveyed not only CMO’s and marketers, but also CEO’s, about their views on what makes marketing effective. The research was then published by the
CMO Council. Here are a few things we discovered along the way.
CEO’s view on how to measure marketings performance
How CEO View Marketing Value and Performance
This information is a few years old now, but I can tell you that based on client work that the down turn has done nothing to change this, if anything, it has placed greater importance on the top 3-4 responses. Keep the top responses on these charts in mind as we move to the next section.
Last month, I was given access to a database of senior level marketers (SVP and up) to do some analysis for the organization that owns it. We looked at the background and experience of over 800 marketers with the following titles:
- 50% were CMO’s
- 32% EVP’s of Marketing
- 8% SVP’s of Marketing
- And interestingly enough 10% had CEO titles but had recently been the head of marketing
They came from large, medium and small companies including start ups:
- 25% – Large (over $500M)
- 32% – Medium ($100-$500M)
- 23% – Small ($50-$100M)
- 22% – Start up or under $50K
We were interested in assessing their area of expertise, experience and tenure.
Although executives with Product Management and Sales Enablement/Demand Gen experience represent only 27% of the total group, they represented a disproportionate amount of executives with the longest tenure. In fact, they were twice as likely (as a representative percentage) to be in the 2-5 years tenure category than those with Brand, Advertising and Corp Comm backgrounds. And they made up half of the individuals in the more than 5 year category.
Another interesting thing we picked up is that markerters in the NYC area were more likely to be new in role versus other regions (higher than average churn…probably attributed to a higher supply of talent).
Spencer Stuart has for many years reported CMO tenure rates (less than the life of a gold fish) but I’ve never seen them look at tenure by background…which makes a difference based on our assessment.
Finally, let’s look at Supply & Demand.
The Top 20 Advertisers in the US have been decimated. Think about…half of the Top 10 advertisers in 2007 were automobile manufactures. As a result, agencies have put hordes of people on the street.GDP in Q4 2008 is estimated to have declined by 6.2% from Q3 that declined by 0.5%. Revenues are down on average of 30-40% from the prior year in most firms (at least the ones we work with).
As a result, there are a slew of marketers with advertising, branding, and corporate comm backgrounds (73% of the database that we analyzed) in the market.
Let’s put it all together:
- CEO’s measure marketing effectiveness by revenue growth and market share
- CMO’s see the greatest need for new talent being driven by the integration of sales & marketing
- A large supply of “above the line” marketers exist in the marketplace
Conclusion– potentially high demand and a low supply of marketers who can drive revenue. The marketers that will be in the highest demand coming out of the recession will be the ones who have been aligned or have had direct responsibility for growing revenue. Marketers that can speak the language of sales. Unfortunately, it will be a slow process for folks with a Brand PR and Corp Comm or the Ex-Agency/Media guys.Marketers with backgrounds in Product Management/Marketing who have owned a P&L, folks with sales backgrounds and/or marketers who can show that they can drive revenue/growth will be in demand first.
The challenge for the other groups is that of supply. It’s not to say that good Brand and Agency folks won’t find positions it’s that it’s going to be hard. Expect that you will be competiting with many other qualified candidates and it may be difficult to differentiate yourself.
