Digital Disruption from EX²

Historically, marketing and IT have not always had the best relationships. Marketers often want things done quickly to reap the greatest benefits from a shift in customer attitudes or a competitor's actions. However, IT may not be able to respond as quickly as marketing would like. The IT department may be spread too thin, preoccupied with issues that affect numerous departments or lacking the "hard" resources needed to meet marketing's demands. 

Any organization interested in becoming a digital enterprise must find a way to get IT and marketing to work together in a peaceful, productive manner. This means building a partnership between the CMO and CIO — after all, a digital transformation starts at the top. Although many companies have found ways to build bridges between the CIO and CMO, the partnership is either non-existent or non-functional in many more. A recent survey conducted by the industry magazine CIO found that 43 percent of those responding reported that the relationship between the CIO and CMO had not changed over the past few years, while 49 percent stated that the relationship had become at least "somewhat closer." Barely more than half — 51 percent — reported that the CMO and CIO worked together for the selection and deployment of marketing technologies.

In the simpler days before the Internet, attribution was easy. Perhaps there was an extension after the phone number given in a television ad or a department number included with the address for mail-in orders that could tie the sale to a specific campaign. Back then, sales tended to progress in a linear fashion. Now, however, the sales journey is anything but linear— and so are your marketing efforts. The problem is that this multi-channel approach makes it difficult for you to attribute your ROI to the correct channel or channels.

There are many different types of attribution modeling. Each has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Most of them rely on the concept of search sessions, which can provide you with insight into the steps followed along the path to a purchase. Not every model is ideal for every business, but one is surely right for you.

If you talk to IT professionals who have been in the industry since the 1980s about the "bad old days," you will probably hear a number of unsettling tales. They will tell about the enthusiasm with which they greeted their first 56k modem or how they had to send bundles of floppy disks to corporate headquarters on a daily basis. They might mention that their first PC had no fixed hard drive and a monochrome monitor. Perhaps they will tell you about the company's first computer system and how employees had two monitors on their desks -- one being a terminal to connect to the server and the other connected to a PC (which was not connected to anything else except a dot-matrix printer). As for email -- well, they would have had little concept of what the term meant.