CMOs Must Balance Technology And Creativity Spending

Marketers are overfunding technology and underfunding creativity. Forrester forecasts that spending for adtech, martech, data, and analytics will grow between 9% and 11%, while spending for agencies will grow a mere 2.4%. Consequently, the experiences that marketers create are built on the same common technology platforms, solve the same user needs, and are designed for the same two devices. Forrester’s presentation at the 2019 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity called for marketers to invest in creative differentiation by shifting $19 billion out of technology and into agency creativity. To guide marketers through this shift, Forrester created an ROI model to show how adding more agency creativity to experiences and marketing will deliver higher net returns for companies that balance technology and creative investments.

 

Are You Aggressively Transforming IT Without Addressing Its Accompanying Risks?

Don’t take a breath just because you’re making huge strides in transforming your IT organization — you probably may not have even begun to handle the associated acceleration of risk. The beginning phase of transforming IT is overwhelming for CIOs in just shy of two-thirds of enterprises globally. Among other things, they are: harmonizing and modernizing tech stacks to cut costs; rapidly adopting hybrid multicloud to speed delivery; trying to transform early Agile and DevOps efforts into test-and-discover continuous delivery; and disaggregating technologies to automate customer and partner engagement, deploy insights to drive smarter decisions, and reach across ecosystems to connect data and systems end to end. But many CIOs — and the firms they work for — have yet to understand and address the huge and accelerating risk exposure that comes with these new models. About a third of C-level respondents identify transformation as the second-most challenging aspect of overall cybermanagement in Deloitte’s 2019 Future of Cyber Survey (as referenced by The Wall Street Journal). And Forrester’s Zero Trust security playbook for 2019 points to reliance on traditional perimeter protection, retrofitted network security, lack of security visibility and analytics, and weak incident response as key factors. To keep from being the subject of a security breach headline, make risk management a key part of your IT transformation governance investment plans.

 

Transportation-As-A-Service By Next Year? Brace Yourself For Acceleration

Certainly, self-driving cars have been all over the media for several years now, but so far it’s been all talk and very little action — at least for most of us. Intel Corp.’s Mobileye announced last fall, along with Volkswagen and Champion Motors, that they are working to commercialize a robo-car service — another big announcement without a timeline. Yawn. Recently, however, Intel CEO Bob Swan announced that they now plan to launch that service in Israel next year. This is important, because a true robo-car service will require level 5 of self-driving — that is, full automation. Today, level 2, or advanced cruise control, is common in new vehicles, but automakers generally predict only “self-driving on the highway,” or about level 3, by next year to 2021. While the notion of getting into a car and having it drive you somewhere is either terrifying or cool depending on your point of view, we think the truly disruptive opportunity is the “as-a-service” business models they enable. Intel’s announcement just accelerated the timeline for transportation-as-a-service disruption by three to five years. If Intel can make it work, watch out.

 

Dear ForeSee, How About “Never”?

We are so tired of being hassled whenever we do anything online to complete some survey on our “experience.” ForeSee, one of the survey companies found ubiquitously littering the web, offers two choices in its annoying popup box: “Yes, I’ll fill out your dumb survey” and “No, thank you” (or something like that). Well, any civilized human being would see that ForeSee is missing an option: “No, thank you, and please never show me another survey.” To be clear, this is really ForeSee’s customers’ problem, but ForeSee could make it the default option and give guidance to the likes of AT&T Wireless (where we recently experienced this annoyance while checking a bill online) to include an opt-out feature. With the privacy worm finally starting to turn (California’s law is scheduled to kick in on January 1, 2020), now is the time to prepare for a proper privacy and preferences strategy. Thank you.