The marketing tech revolution.

• Author: Lord, Bob

WHAT WE MEAN BY CONVERGENCE IS THE COMING TOGETHER OF THREE IRRESISTIBLE FORCES--media, technology and creativity--to meet an immovable object: the enterprise. We're only at the beginning of understanding these dynamics, but we do know one thing: Businesses have to change themselves quickly and dramatically if they want to survive and thrive. They need to rethink how they communicate with customers, the experiences they create, and how they're set up. The key ... is to fully recognize the collision that's occurred and remake the company to deal with it.

The villain ... is the silo. In ordinary parlance, a silo is a structure that contains a single item, usually grain. In business, writes David Aaker in "Spanning Silos," a silo is "a metaphor for organizational units that contain their own management team and talent and lack the motivation or desire to work with or even communicate with other organizational units." He wrote, "Spanning silos, in my view, is the marketing challenge of our time." That was in 2008.

[text incomplete in original source] the details have changed. Aaker was mainly concerned with how country and product silos hurt a business's attempts to efficiently create consistent marketing around the world. We'll take this in a different direction by focusing on how functional silos that separate tech from creativity and creativity from media are preventing brands from providing product and marketing experiences that consumers want and need. Aaker was concerned about the failure of integrated marketing communications, that is, programs that yoke together the various marketing disciplines in a unified way. We're concerned with a grander kind of integration that combines persuasive brand storytelling with powerful technology channels. We're focused on turning marketing itself into a product and service that customers need and want, the very thing that silos deny.

For decades, businesses could quite easily compartmentalize themselves as they tackled the challenges presented by media, technology and creativity.

Let's look at how each discipline was handled in the traditional schema compared to how it exists now.

Media

THEN: For decades, there were two flavors of media: bought and earned. Paid media was something that could be bought every year in a showy event called the television upfront, when the TV networks put together a splashy party to roll out their new shows and get buyers to commit billions of the clients' ad dollars ahead of the coming season. The deal making was handled by specialist media-buying agencies that, through the aggregation of many big advertiser budgets, wielded great clout in the marketplace and thus could command scale discounts. Earned media, on the other hand, was attention won through public relations (PR) strategies that persuaded news reporters to write favorable articles about a company and its products.

NOW: The one-way communications model that used TV ads and PR to persuade consumers to buy your product is dead. Each consumer is a small, independent media company capable of publishing in multiple channels. The reputation of your brand rests on the whim of consumers. The communications landscape is reinvented every few months and, as a result, that glacial up-front process in which media is bought many months in advance makes little sense. PR agencies and departments struggle to organize around a communications ecosystem in which the consumer voice has been unboxed and amplified.

Technology

THEN: Technology was the back-end world of servers and intranets, traditionally the domain of the chief information officer (CIO) and the chief technology officer (CTO), each with very different responsibilities. Considered mere infrastructure, technology was noticeable mainly when it wasn't working and was more associated with the cost of doing business than innovation. Offshore system...