Marketing teams are using a lot of different tools today – that’s evident from even a cursory glance at this infographic of the marketing technology landscape from Scott Brinker. All of the tools, as diverse as they are, aim for the same goal: make the people who use them more successful at marketing.

Each organization is different – if that infographic was a transparency (remember those?) that was applied to each company, different circles and logos would light up. Every marketing team has built their own marketing technology landscape (or marketing machine.) Some have a machine with one or two pieces, and others have machines with many moving parts.

What’s led to the explosion of all this technology? When you boil it down, it’s all about the marketer’s core job of delivering the right message at the right time to an individual. That’s what the marketing technology landscape is helping people do.

Regardless of whether your marketing machine is made up of a couple of moving parts (maybe you bought into one of those “everything and the kitchen sink” suites) or you have many best of breed solutions in your Swiss Army knife of a marketing machine, the goal is the same: Right Message, Right Time.

And the journey of how you get there is also similar.

It’s a big virtuous marketing circle, that grinds to a halt – or at least a slow crawl – when someone realizes…

“I need an asset.” Or, in most cases, hundreds (or thousands) of them.

Those assets get produced, and eventually, you have assets and other parts of the machine jump into action to store finished assets and to plan, build and launch the campaigns. Campaigns get published, generating more and more data that feeds into refining the plan and the insights – enter the big huge marketing circle.

That’s glossing over a lot of details, but in general that is what marketing does. Plan. Execute. Analyze. Adapt. Plan. Execute. Adapt. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

This has always been the way of marketing, ever since the first cave man who was marketing clubs and spears to the cave dwellers next door. I can just picture the first marketing insight occurring to the guy who noticed he was selling more spears when food supplies were running low. It wasn’t quite big data, but it was a start.

Marketing has been around for a long time, so we know that technology hasn’t shaped what marketing does. Technology has only increased the possibilities and helped us optimize execution against those possibilities. As marketers we are better able to understand, profile and segment our customers. We’re better able to plan, test and adapt campaigns. There are so many pieces of the marketing process that we’ve been able to optimize by investing in marketing technologies.

But there is a gap.

The Asset Production Gap.

Most marketers can’t produce enough assets to fill the opportunities they have.

Think of asset production as the oil that fuels the marketing machine. All of that technology being used to capture data and generate better insights? That creates an opportunity to plan and launch better-targeted campaigns. But if you don’t have the assets to feed those campaigns, then the marketing machine isn’t firing on all cylinders.

I’m obviously biased in making that statement, based on what my company does, but it’s no less true. Most every agency and enterprise marketing team is struggling with this problem.

They can’t deliver enough assets. They can’t deliver them in time. They can’t deliver them at a cost that is ROI effective.

Marketing Technology Created the Gap

Why do marketers need to deliver more assets? Because they invested in marketing technology that allows them to better understand, profile and segment their customers. They use this information to design more hyper-targeted campaigns, all of which need more assets (the fuel!)

Why do marketers need to deliver assets more quickly? Because they’ve also invested in technology that allows them to capture campaign data almost instantaneously. Once they have the data, they can model it into insights faster than ever before and instantly launch modified campaigns – but data and the corresponding insights have a shelf life. If marketers can’t move quickly enough to take advantage of data that’s available now (and valid now) then the opportunity disappears. Real-time data is driving the need for just in time asset production to fuel campaigns now, not tomorrow.

Can we close the gap with more people?

That was once the right answer. Hire more designers. Hire more copywriters. Hire more traffic managers. But like in so many other aspects of the marketing supply chain, the “more people” answer is no longer right. The scope and scale of the opportunity is too big, too fast, and too complex.

People are part of the equation, but not all of it. People power must be matched with smarter asset production processes. Then, those people and processes need to be supported by smarter marketing technologies. And, as you can see in our re-ordering of the marketing technology landscape, there aren’t many solutions categories that help marketers optimize the process between “I need an asset” and “I have an asset.” We need a better bridge.

Marketing Technology Will Close the Gap

Marketers know they have a problem. They know they have to deliver more assets. They have to deliver them quickly. They have to deliver them cost-effectively.

In order to fix the problem, marketers know that the solution starts with a more effective way to manage the creative production process. Manage the process and you can understand where the bottlenecks are. If you know where the bottlenecks are, you know what to fix. Fix them and the process is optimized. Rinse, repeat.

Marketers are starting to fix the problem. At the same time, existing players in the marketing technology landscape also see the problem, and are trying to find way to help fix it.

Hacks & Feature Driven Solutions

Some marketers and marketing technology providers have determined the solution is to extend, adapt, and hack current marketing technologies to solve the problem. They’re adding annotation capabilities to their Digital Asset Management (DAM) or Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platforms. They’re using their project management and general all-purpose collaboration tools to manage the creative production process.

This is the rickety-bridge solution to addressing the asset production gap. It solves part of the problem, but not all of it. Those technologies were not designed, developed and optimized for the creative (or asset) production process.

The Best of Breed Solutions

We’ve all see this movie before. New needs emerge. They’re initially met by hacks and feature driven solutions. As the need becomes more and more pressing, and better defined by customers, that’s when you see best of breed tools emerge. Just look at that infographic again and think back to when many of those distinct categories of technology were features and extensions of other applications.

We’re starting to see the same thing happen as more and more marketers seek to fix their asset production gap.

We call it Creative Operations Management. Again, my bias is shining through here, because this is what ConceptShare has evolved into. From a pure online proofing solution, we’ve grown into a tool that we and our customers have shaped into a solution that allows marketing and creative teams to manage, measure and continuously optimize the creative production process.

The New Marketing Technology Player: Creative Operations Management

If you’re new around here, I’ve written a few in-depth posts covering what creative operations management is, and why it’s so important for enterprise marketing teams.

To summarize, it’s the process of optimizing everything that happens between “I need an asset” and “I have an asset.” This includes all the steps involved in routing, reviewing and approving work in progress assets. Which translates into:

There are more and more best of breed tools being launched or existing tools being adapted (and re-positioned) to meet this growing need. Marketers are demanding it. And companies like ConceptShare, GlobalEdit, Kreate Technologies and others are meeting that demand.

In a follow up post, I’ll share how more and more enterprise marketing departments and agencies are using best of breed Creative Operations Management tools. I’ll look at how these tools are being integrated into the broader marketing technology machines being built by those marketing departments and agencies. In the process, I hope to convince Scott Brinker that in his next update of the Marketing Technology Landscape infographic, he needs a 46th category.

Agree? Disagree? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment or get in touch on Twitter at @nishpatel or @conceptshare.