A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Marketing Operations Summit that was organized and hosted by PTI Marketing. It was two days of 150+ Marketing Operations leaders listening to and learning from each other. I was there as a guest of PTI Marketing with whom we just entered into a new partnership (more on that in a couple of weeks).
There was a lot of great content that was shared by people working in the Marketing Operations trenches on a daily basis. People shared their challenges around getting buy-in for technology investments, using technology to create a tighter loop between sales and marketing, deploying marketing technology, using that technology most effectively, juggling the growing buffet of specialized marketing applications, and trying to synthesize all of the data from those applications to tell a unified story of “how is marketing performing.”
Today, I want to talk about an off the cuff remark I heard Coleman Kane (CEO, PTI Marketing) make while he was introducing one of the panels. As he looked out on a packed room of 150+ Marketing Operations leaders he said (and I am paraphrasing here) “Five years ago it likely would have been impossible to find 150 people whose job was defined as Marketing Operations. And today we have 150 people here at the first conference dedicated entirely to the function of Marketing Operations.”
What he said stuck with me. Curious, I cracked open my laptop and went to LinkedIn and used advanced search to search on Title = Marketing Operations. There were 8,800+ results. Not everyone had those specifics words in their current or past title, but they were somehow defined as working in Marketing Operations.
That got me to wondering, what would the search results have been 5 years ago when Marketing Operations was still emerging as both a job and a field of technology? And then that got me thinking about a chicken and egg issue. Did the role of Marketing Operations appear first or did the technology/applications used by Marketing Operations professionals appear first. Did the role/people follow the technology or did the technology follow the role/people?
I don’t know. And I am sure that if you asked 10 Marketing Operations professionals and 10 technology companies whose products are targeted at Marketing Operations professionals that you would not get a consistent answer.
After Kane’s comment about Marketing Operations I couldn’t help but think about the decision we made a couple of years ago when we planned where we were taking our product and our company.
We made the conscious decision to build a Creative Operations Management (COM) platform. We did it because we saw an emerging need for enterprise marketers to effectively manage the process of going from “I need an asset” to “I have an asset.” At the same time we noticed that some of our own clients were starting to fill roles that had job titles that we had never heard of before, titles like Vice-President of Creative Operations or Creative Operations Manager.
If you go to LinkedIn and do an advanced search on Title = Creative Operations you will get back a little over 300 results. That tells me that Creative Operations, unlike Marketing Operations, is not a known field of work just yet. Walk into any big marketing organization and they can have a conversation about how they define the role of Marketing Operations, what that role is responsible for, and can list the tools they use to get their job done. Ask them the same question about Creative Operations and 9 out of 10 will ask you what that is.
Does that mean we (ConceptShare) have misread the market? Not at all. I think we are at the same spot as the first technology companies that emerged to support the growing field of Marketing Operations 5+ years ago.
I see more and more companies creating new positions around the role of Creative Operations. I have more and more conversations with enterprise marketers that are proactively looking to more effectively manage the process of going from “I need an asset” to “I have an asset”.
Fast forward a couple of years and I think I’ll be writing about all of the great content shared by 150+ Creative Operations leaders at the first Creative Operations Management Summit.
What do you think comes first, the job title or the technology? Leave a comment below.