Marketing for CEOs: Death or Glory in the Digital Age

Book Preface

We are over halfway through a massive transformation of the advertising industry. Smartphone penetration is getting close to 100% in many parts of the world and it won’t be too long (maybe 2-3 years) before most TV and video viewing is streamed on demand and most newspapers and magazines will be read on a screen. At that point, almost all marketing will be digital. In parallel, the amount of data about your customers (and potential customers) is growing exponentially. These two trends are converging to destroy mass marketing, along with the associated slow planning timelines and wasted budgets. You will soon be able to micro-target every communication, and use data and rapid feedback loops to adapt every campaign in real time.

To succeed in this new world, the marketing function needs to reinvent itself fast, and it won’t be easy. The number of marketing technology platforms and available ad formats are in the thousands and ever-changing. The future of the advertising agency as we know it is being fundamentally challenged. There is an ever-present risk of fraud, or damaging your brand. The data is overwhelming. As CEO, it is OK for you to be confused. Unfortunately, most marketing leaders are also confused, and are floundering when it comes to embracing the new world and capturing these new opportunities.

I meet senior marketing people all over the world, and am generally disappointed by the ignorance, fear, poor numeracy and lethargy that I often encounter. When I brought this up with some CEO friends, they said they weren’t surprised, as they themselves didn’t understand the changes and opportunities, so they weren’t capable of setting higher expectations of marketing—or of supporting the necessary transformation.

This book has been simmering within me for too long, and I just have to get it out! It sets out to address these problems. It will equip CEOs to be able to quickly grasp the current (and future) world of marketing, along with the massive potential to invest in ways to tangibly grow the value of your company through marketing. This will help you set much more ambitious and future-proof goals for marketing. While reading the book, you may come to the realization that your marketing leaders are not fit for their purpose, and need to be replaced. The book deals with that, too.

As you are a CEO and busy, I have tried to keep the book short, while equipping you with the key points to demand more from marketing.